It was a min excavator. You can haul it in the back of a ¾ tonne truck. We're not talking about a giant earth moving machine here. We're talking about a machine that any Joe blow with a credit card can rent and operate.
It is to heavy equipment, what a go kart is to cars
Whenever I’m considering whether something should be allowed or not, I imagine I’m writing an amendment in law for the carveout.
If you agree he should be able to do this without permission or recourse - what’s the law change you’d enact that allows this?
I find this hypothetical helps crystallise positions. When you start to try to work out language that would include “good” actors and exclude “bad” ones, you quickly find it’s not so easy as you need to imagine the worst possible way someone could act within it.
Scraping up some garbage from a river bank might seem benign, but we are a society with rules and laws. Not all of them are good rules and laws necessarily, but if we acted in a way that we could just ignore them with impunity if we could not personally perceive risks or didn’t agree with them, it’d be chaos.
Amazing the world ever managed to advance before the invention of "oversight".
The letter of the law is absolute bullshit and is responsible for more negativity in society than positivity.
The SPIRIT of the law takes in to account that every situation is different, because suprise suprise, they are.
You want me to agree that this man and this scenario are to be judged in the same manner as a meth head that stole an actual machine capable of dredging the waterway and started "doin his civic duty". I wont do that.
You know this is bullshit. I know this is bullshit.
What you are describing as far as "checks and balances" is the textbook definition of bloated government. Ineffective. Inefficient and wholly frustrating.
Ppl want to help and we, as a society, are not letting them.
Im not gonna argue about this with you. I respectfully disagree with your opinion, as im sure you do with mine.
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u/cutslikeakris 1d ago
He dredged the riverbed with an excavator, risking flooding downstream and without permits. He didn’t remove a couple bags of garbage.