Douglas Lee: Life: Swatting? Blackstone "scam"? Ignorance of the Law? Why is it so hard to be a good citizen?

Friday, December 6, 2013

Life: Swatting? Blackstone "scam"? Ignorance of the Law? Why is it so hard to be a good citizen?

How does anyone even keep up with everything these days? I am in the middle of writing a blog on "Ignorance of the Law" about how can the law expect average citizens to know all the laws while judges cannot even agree if a car is legally parked depending on parking signs.

Since I started, I read about the insurance "scam" that Blackstone committed (not including losing whatever trust I have left in our public news journalists with the lack of coverage or rather their priorities). In what I think is a scam yet somehow legal, a company can basically buy insurance to protect the car, mark the car with an erasable marker, then collect the insurance. How does an average citizen feel like the government is against them when they cannot even collect their insurance on legitimate claims or legal technicalities (plenty of articles from Superstorm Sandy)?

Then I came across "swatting" a new prank that can get any random person with internet access get in a lot of trouble. This does not only impact internet subscribers if the prankster has access to your phone number or address. Ever wonder how easy it is to order pizza? Then wonder if you used someone else's address? Now just imagine that on a much grander scale. Average citizens have to worry about this even if the law is not ready for it. How does the law expect citizens to be perfect? We can barely do one think perfectly, yet expected to know perfectly everything with perfect knowledge?

Then I read about our representatives working on new legislation. Isn't there like a common sense law somewhere? Something like, you cannot get rewards by committing a negative action? Should law enforcement have ways to track people who put in false calls or false orders?

On top of all that, the most frustrating part is figuring where to put my attention to. I believe there are plenty of good people, not just good citizens. I meet them all the time and more frequently than bad people. We all work towards good things, but I feel that "bad people" have split our focus so that they can divide and conquer our efforts.

Either that or we need to find a better way to fundamentally change the laws for the better. I am terrible with following what laws are passed (is there anyone that does... doesn't seem like even politicians know what they pass either... yet we're still accountable to it), but I feel that the laws we pass are just patches.

In software development, patches do not fix the underlying problem. Eventually, the product cannot support all the demands added to it effectively. Either the product needs to be refactored or be replaced by another product. The latter would be a revolution in government terms.

Shouldn't a citizen who has good intentions be automatically good citizens? I think good people are frustrated because they must consider so many immoral, unethical factors while bad people just continue to exploit loopholes. To deflate some of my reader's egos, this includes just people who speed above the speed limit all the time while on a random select get speeding tickets. I just wanted to muddy our belief that "I am good" while "others are bad" mentality. In this scenario, should we all just be driving the speed limit? Yet in today's world driving the speed limit causes a lot of ire from the majority of drivers. Then there's the unfortunate person who maintains the new norm but gets ticketed just because of some factor not in his control like officer happened to look up at that moment, easy to identify, didn't have a trailer truck to reduce visibility, etc. Do we really want to that kind of system? The police surely does not but they can only follow the rules that have passed by the representatives that we elected. Perhaps, we need the ability to elect someone that does not want to be elected. Of course one of their traits would have to be that they have social responsibility if it is placed upon them. I have definitely across a couple people who I thought would make great politicians, choose not to be one, but would do it if called upon... like jury duty. Perhaps being in jury duty should be one prerequisite to being a public officer.

I apologize again for just spewing ideas again. I find each topic important to put down. I want to reword and restructure but I know myself better than putting this on the shelf until I get around to fixing this like many other unfinished posts (at least this is more complete than most of the other random thoughts). On the bright side, I do learn a bit more about myself as I write more. Each month I do notice that there are some values that I find easier to define than before.