this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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Wow, this is a weird one. I thought for sure this was going to be someone being charged with mudlarking without a license (still outrageous but justifiable if they were also scooping up historical artifacts), but apparently it’s for creating a flood risk?? Brother, your flood protection shouldn’t be a mass of garbage. Someone make this charge make sense.
I'm gonna lean on another commenter who made me realise the legitimate reasoning behind something like this (disregarding the fact that two years is absurdly high): If we permit anyone to do whatever "cleaning" they themselves deem reasonable without approval, we risk that unknowledgable people with good intentions cause serious damage. One reason could be that they create an acute flood risk (you're right: garbage shouldn't be flood protection, but the actual flood protection is built around existing circumstances, and if removing the garbage causes a major risk to people losing their homes, the correct approach is to first prepare the flood protection, then remove the garbage). Another is that people can unknowingly or unintentionally destroy habitats or otherwise damage the environment.
The point is: We have some very competent people that are capable of assessing the impact of various cleaning operations. We need to let those people do their job. There can be very complex interactions in play, that turn your good intentions into catastrophic consequences. Therefore, we cannot allow laymen to judge how large cleaning operations should be conducted.
Full disclaimer: While I think the above reasoning is sound, I think we should be very careful regarding how unauthorised cleaning operations are punished. For example, it seems absurd to me to give jail time for it. When the person in question is obviously acting with good intentions, it's much more reasonable to sentence them to take some course where they can learn about why what they were doing was potentially harmful, and perhaps sentence them to community service working on some authorised project. That way, you help them learn, let them work on something they want to contribute to, and get more resources for the authorised projects.
I feel like the punishment should depend on whether they did it competently or not. You should definitely get punished for screwing up even with good intentions, but if you actually are good enough to know what you're doing, you should get away with a relative slap on the wrist.
I a bit sceptical of basing punishments in situations like this on competence rather than intention, I say that as an engineer myself. If you give milder punishment to people that "know what they're doing", you're essentially subverting the whole premise that there is a single entity responsible for evaluating what is safe and what isn't.