[thinkingtoilet]

It's amazing how much power one person can have if we let them. I would organize people to talk to the people who made the ban and let them know you are unhappy. People pay so little attention to local politics that even an issue like this can result in someone being elected or not being reelected.

[ryandrake]

It really is crazy in the USA how much of an overreaction a single, loud, entitled, nosey, complaining neighbor can get with local government: whether it's complaining about kids making noise, complaining about kids playing alone, complaining about traffic, complaining about suspicious black people in their neighborhood, complaining about the length of their neighbor's grass or a car parked in front of their house. You read all these stories about how one complaint resulted in the police being deployed, fines being assessed, innocent people getting in trouble, roads getting speed bumps and 5 all-way stop signs, and other crazy shit happening because some one person couldn't manage to mind their own business.

[jpk]

I think part of this is because people often don't appeal to local government unless they've got an axe to grind. Nobody goes to the city council meeting to comment on how everything is great and things are fine the way they are. So when someone shows up to complain about ice cream truck music, the people who are pleased, or at least indifferent about it, don't show up to oppose the complainer, and the signal the council members get is that it's a problem and a city ordinance or whatever is required. There are typically opportunities in the local law-making process to allow someone to oppose the complainer, and it does happen, but few will match the complainer's level of effort. Then if a law makes it on the books, local LEOs become the complainer-class's customer service representatives, and you get what you're describing.

Ultimately, local civic engagement is often what matters most to your day-to-day life, which is good. I think effective and durable self-governance must start at the local level. But we get blasted by media related to national politics at every time and season, to the point that the thought of trying to stay dialed into local government is a non-starter for many. If all the attention we can bear to allocate to politics is monopolized by the national wedge issues of the day, who will muster the volition to save the ice cream truck music?

[Der_Einzige]

Now imagine a determined AI agent empowered by a nefarious and disgruntled AI researcher.

[dylan604]

When it comes to government reps that field calls like this, there's some variation of a formula saying for every one phone call translates to X number of people that feel the same way but do not make the call. It used to be different weightings for someone calling vs writing a letter. Either way, it was more a statistics reaction. Not sure if this comes into play or not.

It could also be that the single person that did complain happens to be a close friend or even related to someone else powerful, or is just influential in the area in other ways. That tilts the weighting as well.

[antonymoose]

I’ve grown up in a Hollywood Hillbilly-esque family, one that made it but kept to the original values. That is to say the e’ve “made it” and live in a highly regarded vacation destination area. Except I grew up learning to stand up to bullies, ne’er-do-wells, and miscreants, if that meant coming to fisticuffs, so be it.

From a young age I learned a fascinating lesson, socially speaking, is that some non trivial percent of the population does not at all mind the proverbial “Karen” causing a ruckus for the community. However, the second you stand up and tell them you don’t agree, somehow, you are the one held responsible as the troublemaker.

It’s not the initial ruckus causer that matters, it’s the conflict causer that does. Too many don’t care about change in any way, they care about “the peace.”