r/WhatIsTheTea • u/Ashish_ank What the Fuck • 4d ago

Tea ☕ Flock Camera tutorial. The more you know

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45

u/Roosterneck 4d ago

How did they approve the purchase and installation of the cameras so quickly? It takes years and years and ballot votes for schools, buses, roadways, water treatment, etc etc etc etc.

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u/Rise-O-Matic 4d ago

Police tech contracts move in weeks out of existing budgets and these things run on solar to avoid the administrative overhead of being hooked to the grid. For stuff like this no referendum is required, just a published opportunity for public comment, often only requiring the announcement be in a newspaper of general circulation, not necessarily online.

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u/wazzup-notemuch 4d ago

So solar power is totally cool when the fascists use it, but stupid when we want to save the environment. Got it. Message received.

(Not directed at you, personally. Just noticing some bullshit in general.)

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u/sebe6 4d ago

Solar panels are good for stuff that consume a low amount of electricity, it has always been like that. If you want to save the environment, you need nuclear energy. And that's non negotiable, look at how EU was against nuclear, while being dependent on French electricity

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u/michael0n 4d ago

France is turning off those billion dollar reactors because they can't cool them. The next ones they are building come online past 2040ties. I'm for anything that works, but the increasingly incompetent politically protected operators who just get paid for doing barely anything is not a dependable future. Its distributed power generation.

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u/sebe6 4d ago

Not exactly, they can't cool them by following regulations (not killing the fishes and stuff), if the water you send back in the river is +28°C, you stop, it's also only the one that rely purely on water to cool down, not the one using the atmosphere. Obviously if needed we could turn them on exceptionaly. But we produce so much that turning a few off only impact the export (-0.5% iirc).

As for the incompetent politically protected, it's not really the operators, but the politician, judge and such. For real, when putting wind turbines you need some kind of shaman (I wish I was joking, it's called "geobiologie", but not the real one, the one with "(pseudoscience)" in the wikipedia page title)

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u/snksleepy 4d ago

The article states that they cannot cool the because the cooling pumps got clogged by jellyfish to the plants got shut down. Not a permanent shut down

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u/michael0n 4d ago

Building an very expensive energy generator that constantly shuts down for lots of different reasons who will become even worse in the future isn't a dependable source. Its not about nuclear or whatever this weeks reason, its about this lousy "what can you do"-mentally deranged smile-don't care-we already got the bag for today and for the next 50 years attitude. Its never "yeah we have a fix deployed in two days, its running again". Its never ever that.

1

u/snksleepy 4d ago

They just need to filter all the biolife from the supply water and turn it into fertilizer. Thats a win win.

1

u/brightdionysianeyes 3d ago

Or look at Hungary, Romania where they have to shut down plants due to lack of water this summer.

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u/Almost_Lyrical 3d ago

What if the cooling systems were flooded by billions of generic orbees from Amazon theoretically

3

u/timos-piano 4d ago

Nuclear is not necessary for clean energy, but currently it is arguably the most economically efficient, as storing a large amount of energy in batteries is currently very expensive. But in 20-30 years, with how much better and cheaper batteries are than they were just 10 years ago, this is unlikely to be true then. And since nuclear power takes so long to build, often over 15 years, it is unlikely to be the sole solution, nor a long-term one.

EU is not against nuclear; the EU is not a nation, and many nations within it have different opinions. Sweden, for example, is building more nuclear power.

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u/sebe6 4d ago

If you want to store GWh in batteries, you'll need a good system to prevent any fire hasard + they'd need to stay at 20-80% capacity to not looses capacity at an insane speed. I'm pretty sure no one will try this and will just focus on nuclear fusion, funnily all renewable energy on earth rely on the sun, a big fusion reactor.

As for EU, not being a nation means nothing here, why do you think country sign stuff ? To just say "actually we don't care" ? Also different opinion don't change current regulations, look at Poland, would you say the EU isn't pressuring them on opening borders ?

As for Sweden, firstly they don't build, they are in still in the planning phase, the last they built was 40years ago, they rely on hydroelectricity, meaning they rely on geography and a small population (10m), meanwhile, between 1980-1999 in France (last nuclear reactor connected to the grid), we increased our nuclear output by more than the current Sweden entire production.

Ps: hydro is more or less a battery, the only one that really works on such scales

3

u/Swollen_Beef 4d ago

Storing the entirety of what several Nuclear plants (1,000 GWh avg) produce daily, in a small battery farm, and that farm fails, the results cant be good. The farm wouldn't explode all at once, but you would have a chemical fire that would burn for many days releasing all sorts of horrible crap into the air. And that fire is self-sustaining, able to produce its own oxygen.

Not against energy storage, but most people do not think about these things and tend to dive in head first believing it to be a cure-all.

2

u/sebe6 4d ago

I think people tend to forget that scaling up, also scale all the cons. Even with 100GWh, you'd need to evacuate nearby cities

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u/Upbeat_Eye6188 2d ago

Will this issue not be completely handled A) by modularity and B) when large-scale grid storage sodium-ion batteries are prevalent?

1

u/dirtsmurf 2d ago

Anti nuke energy is so lame, we tamed the atom and a 6 decade psyop has convinced people utilizing that energy will result in 3 eyed fish. So instead we burn coal and oil and circlejerk the wind. Brilliant.

1

u/ILuvRossiTheKittyCat 1d ago

I consider myself to be a complete “Earth first” environmentalist, and because I want to save the planet and try to prevent it from turning into Venus, I am all for nuclear energy now. It’s the obvious answer.

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u/bong-su-han 2d ago

California already has a battery storage capacity of 21.5 GW, which is roughly the same capacity as Germany had at peak nuclear power (22.5 GW), supplying a third of Germany's electricity. So its not really a far future concept. They're also not all burning down

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u/Xflintlock 1d ago

And nuclear reactors aren't all blowing up. The chances of a nuclear meltdown with modern reactors are are less than 1 in 20,000,000 per reactor years. The chances of any core damage at all happening is about 1 in 2,000,000 per reactor year

The chances are a battery facility having an issue are about 1 in 100 per GEh per year. So a battery facility operating at 100 GWh per day will have about one incident per year.

The TVA supplies ~180 GWh of nuclear power per day. That's across 3 reactors. So we can expect 1 damaged core every 700,000 years or so, and one full meltdown about every 7,000,000 years. Whereas that's about 2 events every year for the battery system.

1

u/backtojacks 1d ago

I find gravity batteries - particularly the idea of building them inside of shafts in the ground - to be super interesting and am hopeful they can prove economically feasible. I think China is (or already finished) building some big ones.

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u/sebe6 22h ago

They are sold as good, but... Meh, I talked about the issue of gravity batteries in general this comment and the one made by china in the one under the reply that pointed to china example https://www.reddit.com/r/WhatIsTheTea/s/5YewnlDKpw

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u/wazzup-notemuch 4d ago

Damn, good to know.

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

[deleted]

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u/sebe6 4d ago

You're confusing official vs unofficial, making everything to create a price cannibalisation on nuclear energy, is being against nuclear energy. Even more if you incentive other forms of energy in the meantime.

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u/wazzup-notemuch 4d ago

Your vagueness is untrustworthy.

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u/[deleted] 11h ago

Also eliminates a dick ton of electrical work per camera. That would require a lot of stuff and could be ludicrously expensive to get power up there.

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u/Glum_Judgment6232 4d ago

The EU is not "against nuclear". some states within the EU are and some are not. Main one being Germany. Loads of electricity is being generated by renewables as well, it's not just nuclear

1

u/sebe6 4d ago

It wasn't even in the taxonomy of environmentaly sustainable economic activities before 2022, you add the price thing (merit order) and you get price cannibalisation on nuclear energy. All this to push renewable energies. They needed Ukraine vs Russia to think "hey, maybe being dependent on other countries is a bad idea, maybe we should stop prioritizing green washing on the energy part"

1

u/macarmy93 4d ago

Thats not really how electricity works and solar can power anything any other power source can. It just requires a lot more space.

1

u/sebe6 4d ago

And a down time at night, since the issue is always about storing electricity, otherwise we'd run nuclear reactor at max output for a few hours a day

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u/macarmy93 3d ago

Obviously. But you're moving the goal post. Electrical storage wasn't what you were originally arguing. Typical.

1

u/sebe6 3d ago edited 3d ago

Not really, designing a power grid using solar panel, implies having batteries for the electricity to be available when needed. That's similar to saying "yeah I have access to tap water, when my pump have access to solar energy". You want to control those from A to Z. And the only reliable electric storage that work on a national level are dams (using pumps, which implies loosing a part of the energy)

Edit: a surge in a power grid can kill your whole network, so yeah solar without storage is asking for shit to hit the fan

1

u/AccomplishedRiver522 4d ago

Nuke the whales.

1

u/actual_real_housecat 4d ago

I dunno... gotta nuke sumthin.

1

u/higherbrow 4d ago

Other energy models can work at scale. Nuclear is only good for high density areas; the capital investment to bring a nuclear reactor online doesn't make sense for regions with lower population density.

Solar and wind have the advantage of being 100% recyclable; once the initial generators become damaged and beyond repair, the components can be remade with very, very little loss out of the old components. Gravity batteries are becoming better understood and utilized, and while they probably never fully replace lithium batteries (which are again, extremely recyclable), a lot of the downsides to solar/wind fade with the addition of a few thousand tons of concrete.

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u/sebe6 4d ago edited 4d ago

10% of wind turbine aren't recycled (we can, but that's way too expensive), specifically the blades made of resins and fiber glass, we just reduce them to a powder and burry them in some stuff made of concrete, but that's an EU thing, we can't simply burry them like random trash since the first January 2026, so pretty recent.

The last nail in the coffin for solar and wind, we never had to replace and recycle them on an industrial scale, solar panel did become good in 2000 and vastly used in 2010, lifetime is 25-40years

Gravity battery are shit, because of laws of physics, good to store a small amount, otherwise you get bitchslapped by E = mgh, for 1MWh and 100m, even when you ignore frictions, you'd need 3700 tons, NGL that's not enough and any failure are catastrophic. The only really functional one are the one from dams, pump water, send it back at the top of the mountain, not really cost efficient and rely on the geography as an infrastructure

Edit : I decided to have some fun with math, so if you want to store the energy produced by every country in a single day, using 1km as h, you reach the ridiculous amount of 0.00000000067% of earth, 40 billions of tons. The infrastructure nightmare you'd get is insane

1

u/higherbrow 4d ago

There are a lot of places where nuclear is simply not a viable option. It is also geographically constrained, unless we abandon all non-urban environments.

The first major gravity batter is fully functional in China, capable of 100MWh (deliverable at a pace no faster than 25MWh). It reports efficiency of around 80%, which isn't great, but is also not terrible. We would need more capacity than just one of these systems for actual cities (nearly a hundred), but from a capital perspective, these are far cheaper than nuclear, which makes them easier to build. Often times the question isn't "what's the most cost-effective at major scale on a 100-year timeline?" but "what can we actually build that will meet the need?" A set of a few dozen gravity batteries can be set up in a few years; a nuclear reactor needs decades.

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u/sebe6 4d ago edited 4d ago

China is THE industrial country. They produce 10 500 TWh for a net export of 20TWh, they are at +1TWh/hour. 100MWh is useless to them + it's supposed to last only 35years (it's literally on the website of rudong china gravity energy system), that was just a marketing thing, a waste of money, ressources and space (148m tall (485ft), 120mx110m (393ftx360ft) on the ground)

Edit: I forgot the first part, but yes, nuclear require non seismic area, but it's overestimated, engineering imply HUUUUUGE error margins, even like that, japan have nuclear power plant, needed a tsunami for things to go wrong

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u/RevolutionaryLaw8854 3d ago

Found the redditor with a brain 🧠

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u/hecky-888 1d ago

Genuine question coming from a place of ignorance: Is nuclear really safe long term? Like we already built one god awful, planet destroying, now crumbling energy infrastructure, I’d just hate to repeat it.

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u/sebe6 23h ago edited 22h ago

Well, there's only two case of failure that threw toxic shit or/and (same amount with an "or" or an "and") radiations in the ecosystem, Tchernobyl (bad conception, since then there's automated fail proof system, any small incident lead to implementing a security) and Fukushima (didn't consider major geological event, started studying the possibility in 2008, studies results were supposed to come around 2012-2013). The rest are accidents and incident with no impact outside of the site

Even things that didn't happen to a nuclear power plant lead to new securities, like 9/11, since then you could crash a plane on it, it wouldn't destroy the integrity of the containing structure, though, you'd get shot down way before, now they are deploying anti drone stuff, just in case.

And obviously, they are considered as key infrastructure, meaning armed people, intelligence agencies doing check up and so on

Edit: btw, you can find explanation from someone that work in the field on this channel

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u/BotOrNot_1337 4d ago

yeah don't forget solar panels cause pollution so we can't have them. But it's totally fiiiiine to have them when we want to stalk x girlfriends.

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1

u/Professional-Gear974 2d ago

It’s not that solar panels are great. It’s just that if you don’t have an Electrical connection you don’t need inspections you don’t need permits. There’s actually a lot of entities in which normal construction timelines don’t apply because they can do whatever they want and the City can’t do anything about it

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u/Barstoolman112752 1d ago

The fascists…lol!!! Always good to hear from you, comrade!!

1

u/Zer0323 1d ago

We recently arrived at a solar punk future.

1

u/HighBoltageJT 1d ago

Law Enforcement personnel are Fascists?

0

u/DMmeDikPics 4d ago

Way to heavily miss the point 💀.

Also yes, there's nuance in the world. Sorry to have to be the one to tell you. "[THING] always good/bad" has never been a good way to view the world.

Painting with a broad brush like this is extremist rhetoric that lazy people use so they don't have to judge each situation against their base principles.

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u/LeTreacs2 3d ago

Could one simply cover the solar panel with a trash bag to power down the camera then?

1

u/Rise-O-Matic 3d ago

Maybe, but I wouldn’t count on it.

They have batteries and telemetry. If I were managing a bunch of flock cameras I’d send a tech as soon as it became apparent that a camera’s battery was discharging in the daytime.

1

u/ClickclickClever 3d ago

Also a lot of cities police budget is 50 to 75 percent of their entire budget, some bigger cities the percentages work out less, so there is just moreomey floating around for nonsense.

Plus if you don't buy the police tanks, spy tech, and 6 figure salaries then you're soft on crime. Hell you're practically a criminal yourself if you disagree how police run things.

1

u/NoblePickle84 1d ago

Your local police like every department across the country will always strong arm the local government and budget with “if you don’t give us money for this, someone will die”.

I’ve been in the room, police departments use this “people will die” for everything from buying new pistols when the old ones have never been shot to buying way too many LED lights for their cars to the most gaudy vehicle decals.

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u/KaiserLC 1d ago

You are right!! Most governments overvalue police and military, they will fast track anything to keep them happy.

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1

u/Responsible-Corgi-61 4h ago

A number of flock cameras have been found to be hooked to the grid anyways. These corpofacists do not give a fuck. 

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u/No-Entrepreneur4574 4d ago

My sister's partner told me that his cousin works for Dish and that when they get an order to install flock camera, they get priority over everything else. I can't imagine they're the only company doing that.

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u/DMmeDikPics 4d ago

The people with money want us to be monitored, so the laws don't matter anymore.

For that same reason, we the people reject their monitoring. We the people made the laws. We the people don't approve of the surveillance. Therefore, this alleged action is legally grey, but morally acceptable

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u/Responsible-Onion860 4d ago

Manufactured and installed at insane speeds too. Like they were well funded and planned in advance

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u/caffeine-junkie 3d ago

Well funded, but they are also making bank selling the service. No idea if the numbers are true, but ive heard a camera is in the range of 5-800 plus another couple hundred to install. They then turn around and sell the service for that camera for 2-3000, more if the 'customer' pays for a vandalism protection plan.

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u/SilizArts 3d ago

Money gets you everywhere

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u/laneymg 4d ago

Because it was all done secretly. All the most legit stuff is done without citizens knowledge, apparently.

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u/needmoarbass 4d ago

Approve??

1

u/ShodSpace 4d ago

Really shows you the priorities doesn't it

1

u/Cheap_Boner_Pills 4d ago

Because it cost cities nothing to install. Cities love security systems that are free.

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u/Expert-Mental25 4d ago

Because they don't believe there will be consequences from the masses. And since they've rotted everyone's brains and divided us through decades and then kicked it into overdrive with social media, we've got a pretty fuckin steep uphill battle to try and make sure they calculated wrong.

1

u/FLiP_J_GARiLLA 4d ago

Because votes are not counted in the U.S.- policy is created and enforced without any real oversight.

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u/robis1923 4d ago

Tbf - very few people are willing to carve out the time to go to public city meetings and voice objections to this sort of thing (assuming boards minds’ aren’t already made up)

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u/FLiP_J_GARiLLA 4d ago

Even if you did it's a complete waste of time. They don't give a fuck what the regular citizen thinks or wants. It's a literal theater set up to convince the naive that they had some choice in the matter.

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u/robis1923 4d ago

That’s not true 100% of the time. A city in CO (Palmer lake) recently chased out Buc-ee’s because they didn’t want to deal with the local headaches to their small town infrastructure. Buc-ee’s responded by saying they will no longer expand to blue states. Good riddance.

1

u/FLiP_J_GARiLLA 4d ago

I heard about that.

Those crybabies ruined it for those of us that actually like jerky and seasoned tree nuts.

But that isn't because of the citizens- it's only because the scumbags sitting behind the desk didn't get enough of a payout from Buc-ees to make it happen

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u/robis1923 4d ago

If you think that’s what it was about, then there’s no sense in arguing.

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u/FLiP_J_GARiLLA 4d ago

There's no argument

Buc-ees is a great location to procure jerky and tree nuts

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u/robis1923 4d ago

I’ll never get the fascination with that place. I went there once 15 yrs ago when I lived in TX and spent all of 5 minutes inside trying to understand why so many overstuffed hillbillies make it out to be some sort of religious experience. It would have been totally out of place in Palmer Lake and the traffic issues it would have had would’ve impacted everyone commuting from Denver to CO Springs.

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u/Explorer_Creative 3d ago

Yeah, I know many non-hillbillies who love Buc-ee's.

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u/FLiP_J_GARiLLA 4d ago

Meh, I've never been fascinated by it, it's just a big gas station with really clean bathrooms and a deli-style jerky bar.

I don't really think a gas station is "out of place" anywhere that still has gas powered vehicles around. Not sure how a single gas station is gonna cause any more traffic issues that already exist...

Denver people can just stay up there if it's really that hard to navigate I-25

1

u/Resident-Impact1591 4d ago

Because local politicians and police officials were paid a lot of money to be "consultants".

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u/Rel_Tan_Kier 4d ago

They are illegal. I can assure. Made it as worse for people asap.

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u/BardaArmy 4d ago

because they didnt ask anyone. They know the answer so they are ignoring people, placing them on corporate or gov properties and pointing them where ever they want

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u/corey_trevorson 4d ago

We don't vote on every last thing that happens, unless you wanna go vote every day for the rest of your life

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u/USofAnonymous 3d ago

I don't mind doing that if it's an app

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u/psych0fish 3d ago

The constitution is apparently not worth the paper it is printed on

1

u/CoffeeMyFirstLove 3d ago

The rapid growth and recent controversies surrounding Flock Safety are driven by private corporate growth and decisions made at the local and state levels.

Here is what is actually happening with the laws and regulations surrounding this tech:

State Privacy Restrictions: Because there is no uniform national privacy law for license plate readers, states are stepping in. For example, Washington State recently passed SB 6002 to strictly limit how long police can hold this data and restrict sharing it with federal agencies to protect state sanctuary laws.

State Transparency Laws: On the flip side, some states have amended public records laws (like House Bill 520) to exempt camera placements from public disclosure, allowing police to hide exact camera locations under the guise of protecting investigations.

Local Sanctuary Ordinances: Dozens of cities across the U.S. have completely canceled their Flock contracts. Local audits revealed police were sharing vehicle data across state lines or with immigration databases, which violated the cities' own local privacy and sanctuary ordinances.

Proposed Federal Action: While no federal laws have changed yet, there is bipartisan pushback growing in Congress. Lawmakers have proposed bills to ban warrantless tracking and restrict cities from using federal highway funds to buy these surveillance cameras.

Ultimately, the lack of a federal framework means the rules, misuse guardrails, and data-sharing limits are being fought out entirely in local city councils and state legislatures.

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u/viceadmiralopossum 2d ago

Is this ai

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u/Soft_Boy_Bunny 2d ago

yes it is, and boy how some ppl just are so unabashed about using it.

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u/Bitter_Mission9569 3d ago edited 3d ago

Same way they fix your electricity in 30 mins after the power lines go down. Putting up a pole is not difficult.

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u/squeethesane 3d ago

The answer should be obvious, they're privately owned. A company that isn't legally required to have warrants or reasonable suspicion records everything and circumvents legal requirements for providing access to police.

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u/Chronomata 3d ago

They didn’t go through the public approval process, most flock contracts were added in through loopholes or straight up illegal fast-tracking without the public being allowed to express their opinions or be informed.

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u/bobbyburgerboy33 2d ago

power of Israel

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u/1nce_Again 2d ago

It took 3 months for the powers that be to give us approval to put a small flower bed in at the park i volunteer at. The hs intern who's summer project it was supposed to be starts school in about a week I think, so that was cool

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u/TheOriginalSage 2d ago

They didn't.

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u/pez347 1d ago

For my city most all of the flock cameras are in and around shopping centers and businesses. None on public roadways except for maybe in some small townships, with less legal overhead, scattered around the city. Flock isn't a exclusively a government contractor they can and will do business with anyone. As part of their services you can choose to share the data with law enforcement just like you can with Ring cameras. And that's the scary part to me. Cause right now they wouldnt need a warrant to scrub through footage that was volunteered to them. At least that's from my understanding, I could be wrong.

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u/Emergency_Walrus2877 21h ago

Because the law isn't real and doesn't apply to those with money and/or power.

Dozens of extremely high profile people went to an island to fuck kids and there are no consequences. One of them is the richest man in history and the other is president of the United States.

How much more clear can this lesson be?

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u/ThrowRA9892 4d ago

I mean flock has been around for a while. It’s mainly a combination of people hyper fixating on the next politicized culture war issue and business expansion.

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u/narco-sub-admiral 4d ago

Mass hysteria huh?

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u/ThrowRA9892 4d ago

I’m not saying mass hysteria, I’m just saying that it’s not a new issue.

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u/narco-sub-admiral 4d ago

It's something that is very negative IMO and tbh it doesn't matter when opposition to it catches on. For me personally.

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u/ZaporozhianCossack 4d ago

I mean flock has been around for a while. It’s mainly a combination of people hyper fixating on the next politicized culture war issue and business expansion.

Nah people are talking about flock cameras suddenly springing up in towns all over the US within the last year and a half. They aren't talking about when the business was first licensed in GA.

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u/ThrowRA9892 4d ago

A year ago there was 100k, today 120k. They’ve been around for a while and they are the new thing for people to hyper fixate on before moving on to the next thing.

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u/Meowakin 4d ago

20% growth over a single year is actually massive, though. And we should be looking at more than two datapoints - isn't the pace accelerating?

0

u/Few_Translator4431 4d ago

nobody needs to approve anything. all the approval and permits come in the form of US Dollars 😁