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Discussion (46 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Fewer and fewer people can make a decent living with traditional work. Hence, my theory goes, the rise of actual lotteries along with influencers, injury lawyers, and schemes like New Orleans.
Something is seriously wrong when family members hope an elderly relative will die on the hospital so they can get a payout, or when people are crashing into trucks or promoting BS snake oil on instagram.
It’s an indictment of the people involved for sure, but our social and economic systems have created the perverse incentives that these people are betting on. And it seems to be accelerating.
"You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket."
It's basically all about people in systems, and as I recall one of the points made is the broken social contract, which was once "you don't have to be the smartest, but if you show up and work hard, there's a place for you to earn a living" -- now it feels like trying to outswim a rising tide of required education and expertise and hollowed-out career paths
And the people in this article are born in the 1960s and 1970s, in the decades that followed, America was booming.
Edit: and of course, there were literal lawyers ordering up these collisions and litigating the fraud. This is just organized crime dangling a lottery payout to poorer people.
I don't think it's that "fewer people can make a living". It's just that we have too many amoral people who won't work.
It's a shame the New Yorker article didn't talk much about the true victims here: the innocent truck drivers.
https://www.wwltv.com/article/news/local/witness-in-louisian...
> Ryan Harris and Jovanna Gardner were indicted Monday for witness tampering through murder and conspiracy to retaliate against a witness through murder in addition to mail and wire fraud for their alleged participation in the staged wrecks.
> The pair are accused in the Sept. 22, 2020, execution-style shooting of Cornelius Garrison, who had secretly been cooperating with the FBI, was a major setback as authorities tried to climb the ladder from small-time scammers and street-level organizers to the attorneys and doctors whom they say raked in millions of dollars through bogus lawsuits and even unnecessary surgeries.
> So far, the case has led to 52 people being indicted and 44 of them pleading guilty, but only a single attorney, Danny Patrick Keating, has entered a guilty in exchange for his cooperation.
How do we know that’s how they discovered Garrison was cooperating?
> On September 18, 2020, the Justice Department unsealed a seven-count indictment charging Garrison with “staging over fifty accidents.” Alfortish and Motta weren’t indicted or named in the document, but they were described, respectively, as “Co-Conspirator A” and “Attorney B.” Garrison’s coöperation with the F.B.I. wasn’t referenced in the text—and it might have seemed that charging him in such a public fashion would be a good way to conceal his role as an informant. But a close reading of the filing encouraged certain inferences. One stray sentence asserted that “Co-Conspirator A instructed Garrison on the number of passengers to include in staged collisions.” Alfortish might have made some unconventional life choices, but he wasn’t a total idiot. He certainly hadn’t supplied that information to the Feds—and the only other person who could have done so was Garrison.
> Four days after the indictment was made public, Garrison had dinner with his mother, Sandra Fontenette, who was seventy-four, at the tidy condominium that she owned, on Foy Street. They ate gumbo and talked. Garrison had been texting with a woman named Kim that afternoon, and they had made plans to hang out after dinner. At around eight-thirty, the doorbell rang, and Garrison went to meet her. But, upon opening the front door, he shouted to his mother, “Get down!” Ten shots rang out, and Garrison collapsed on the floor, dead.
Edit: Who the hell would downvote this?
> Tt was surprisingly easy to find locals willing to risk their lives for money. Nearly a quarter of New Orleans residents live in poverty, and the prospect of a substantial windfall for a few hours’ work apparently outweighed any fear of getting into a car that was about to take part in a high-speed accident.
In fact, the lengths to which some people will go to avoid working for a living is stupendous. I've heard tell of organized crime in my area that sure sounds like a lot of work for not that much pay, i.e. no different than a low-end job.
Like that old quote about entrepreneurs being people who work 100 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours a week, but some twisted parallel of that.
Nonsense. Almost no vehicle even comes with anything like this installed. Some carriers will add driver monitoring computers, and they will emit tones under certain conditions, hard breaking, lane departure, too little following distance; however, to compare these simple alerts to the level of automation in an aircraft is just daffy.
Just finding a GPS that understands vehicle heights and bridge underpass limits is still a significant challenge. So these are never built into any truck I've ever seen. Every driver has a third party device connected up for this purpose. Since those do a terrible job with satellite views most drivers _also_ use a cellphone for the additional navigation assistance it can provide.
On top of that you have things like Jake Breaks, Air Suspension controls, and Differential controls that are important for operating the vehicle but are not at all automated.
Another factor is weight distribuiton. The truck has nothing for this. After you pick up your load you're probably going to hit a Love's or other fuel station so you can use the CAT scale to weigh your truck. If there is too much weight on one axle you need to move your tandems to redistribute the weight. You can be underweight but still get an overweight ticket if you don't manage this correctly. California has specific limits as to how far your axle can be from your kingpin.
Apparently for human drivers as well. Just this weekend, an overpass near my house had a rig stuck because the driver failed to realize his load was taller than the overpass.
The commercial (i.e. CDL requiring 26k+) fleet is fairly bimodal, two fleets if you will. You've got local and local-ish small carriers operating bottom dollar box trucks and tri-axle mack dumps from the 80s. Your average OTR truck is full of cameras and nannies and owned by a mega fleet. The owner operators in their long nose petes exist but are rare. Yeah I'm generalizing here and there's a continuum between all these but still.
Could this be inferred from the air suspension controls?
https://www.airliftcompany.com/workshop/finding-correct-air-...
It's like they all read the same "criminal" forums to learn techniques. From the article:
> Garrison would later recall, for example, that Alfortish had cautioned him to limit the number of passengers to three, because four might raise “red flags.”
In any event, given the extreme danger of a crime like this, the penalties should be more like that of a kidnapping (e.g., life in prison) and not just the 6 months suspended they'll see for insurance fraud. But that would never happen in Louisiana.
The New Yorker was refreshingly frank in this piece. I expected them to tap dance around several things they hit head on.
It's also a good reminder that in this day and age 360 degree dashcams are a must. If I were a professional truck driver, I'd have a bodycam, too.
> Peter Strasser, the U.S. Attorney, was in his office when one of his prosecutors entered, looking shaken, and said that the key coöperating witness in the slammers case had just been murdered. “I would never have believed it, because this was a nonviolent case,”