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Cars should be made safer WRT to the people outside the car who might have to deal with the consequences. For example, a car with spikes on the outside should p

Cars should be made safer WRT to the people outside the car who might have to deal with the consequences. For example, a car with spikes on the outside should probably be illegal. But as long as the danger is knowingly and exclusively contained to the occupant of a vehicle I see no reason to make it illegal. Motorcycles, for example, lack standard safety features like seatbelts and airbags, and yet we haven't made them illegal.

oliwarner 9y ago
I guess I asked for it but I didn't really expect somebody to argue against things like airbags and SRS. Hey, what about driver seatbelts? It's a constant surprise to me just how much some people want to forgo very reliable and affordable technology to play contrarian and stick it to the man. The problem is, it's a team of paramedics, police, fire and rescue who have to scrape your broken arse off the road. You don't just evaporate when your self-reckless decisions snuff you out. And in many counties and US states, motorcyclists have to wear helmets that meet certain safety guidelines.
- jdavis703 9y ago
  I'm not trying to stick it to the man. When I pass on certain safety features it's for practical reasons. I don't like side view mirrors with blind spot detection -- it'll lull me in to not checking over my shoulder if I ever have to drive a car without that feature (or the feature fails). Same thing with wearing a bike helmet, while it sounds excessively vain I have an afro that gets completely destroyed by a helmet, so I don't wear those. At the end of the day I want to be able to opt-in or opt-out of safety features based on a set of personal calculations.
- setr 9y ago
  Its not about eliminating the technology; its about choosing its presence. These safety features are not free to have, and are not necessarily worth their cost, in every situation. But by enforcing it at the federal level you remove that choice from consumers everywhere, with at best a limited understanding of the environment in which the rule is being applied. It is not nonsensical that I might want a $400 death trap versus a $5k properly regulated and safety-confirmed vehicle if I immediately need a car, and I don't have 5k to spend. What regulations do is fuck over anyone who wants the $400 death trap (valid reasons), by only allowing the $5k (and better) to exist. The guys who can afford the regulated machine are better off, the guys who can't are worse off. Why might I be fine with a death trap? Because its that or I lose my job, and I'm willing to take on that risk. And I'm assuming I can better gauge the meaning of that risk for myself than the governments can (whereas they have a better understanding at a macro level) Its not about safety, its about autonomy, and the belief that the government is just able to make poor decisions as you are, but their mistakes are far longer lasting, and destructive.
  - oliwarner 9y ago
    Doing these "worth their cost" risk assessments where n=1 leads to its own problems. Regardless of what they considered their own skill, nobody ever died in car accident, or cut their thumb off in a table saw... until they did. It's hard to be objective about your own absolute risk factors with decades of survival bias to clamber over. And governments don't do this stuff for you, or even just the lobbyist. Injury costs the economy through lost productivity. Fatal RTAs take much longer to investigate and block critical infrastructure. Just going back to vehicles, getting $400 death traps off the road is a good thing. These are often unsafe to other people directly (heavy, no crumple zones) and indirectly through emissions. However deferred implementation of safety features (air bags, SRS, table saw brakes, etc) means that by the time they're mandatory, you can almost always find one second hand. The "death trap" category just gets safer, not more expensive.
    - setr 9y ago
      Ofc, if you believe in the free market, then n=1 calculations will naturally sort themselves out for the most part to the eventual and overall benefit of everyone, better and more efficiently than what the relatively slow-changing government will achieve except in very particular cases. And while you can still find death traps, they're now even deadlier than before because the market still exists for them, but now you can only obtain 10, 20 year old death traps, after regulation instantiates. And ofc the point of regulation is that eventually all death traps leave the used market too, and there's simply nothing at all left to serve this market. Regulation intentionally kills the market being served; ideally for longer-term macro-level benefits. Safety is not free. And governments are not infallible in their devision-making. But neither is the free market. This is the crux of the issue; it depends on who you believe is better able to make macro-level decisions: natural markets or regulatory bodies. Safety, or whatever other hot topic of the day, is just a distraction leading people to talk past each other. and it gets further confounded by current reality vs ideal. ie there's no external costs not being accounted for with the table-saw-stopper if hospitals, insurance, etc aren't being subsidized. If individuals have to pay the whole bill for their mistake, which should naturally be true in a totally free market, then it'll all sort itself out soon enough (lest the market collapse). But since in reality various costs are being subsidized/hidden by greater forces... this doesn't hold so easily. Of course, if gov interference is the primary reason for more gov interference, then you're in a positive feedback loop that probably won't take you anywhere good.
- scaryspooky 9y ago
  If the requirement is written in to law then the US Constitution (or other such documents granting exclusive use to an idea) must be amended to void any patent which prevents competition to meet that requirement. Volvo[1] is the a good steward in this regard, seat belt laws cover most people but the technology itself is free to implement by anyone. That's how it should be. If you can patent something that the government then mandates be included your patents must be invalidated (or you do what Volvo did voluntarily). [1] http://jalopnik.com/volvo-gave-away-their-most-important-invention-to-save-1069825878 http://jalopnik.com/volvo-gave-away-their-most-important-inv...

oliwarner 9y ago

I guess I asked for it but I didn't really expect somebody to argue against things like airbags and SRS. Hey, what about driver seatbelts? It's a constant surprise to me just how much some people want to forgo very reliable and affordable technology to play contrarian and stick it to the man. The problem is, it's a team of paramedics, police, fire and rescue who have to scrape your broken arse off the road. You don't just evaporate when your self-reckless decisions snuff you out. And in many counties and US states, motorcyclists have to wear helmets that meet certain safety guidelines.

jdavis703 9y ago
I'm not trying to stick it to the man. When I pass on certain safety features it's for practical reasons. I don't like side view mirrors with blind spot detection -- it'll lull me in to not checking over my shoulder if I ever have to drive a car without that feature (or the feature fails). Same thing with wearing a bike helmet, while it sounds excessively vain I have an afro that gets completely destroyed by a helmet, so I don't wear those. At the end of the day I want to be able to opt-in or opt-out of safety features based on a set of personal calculations.
setr 9y ago
Its not about eliminating the technology; its about choosing its presence. These safety features are not free to have, and are not necessarily worth their cost, in every situation. But by enforcing it at the federal level you remove that choice from consumers everywhere, with at best a limited understanding of the environment in which the rule is being applied. It is not nonsensical that I might want a $400 death trap versus a $5k properly regulated and safety-confirmed vehicle if I immediately need a car, and I don't have 5k to spend. What regulations do is fuck over anyone who wants the $400 death trap (valid reasons), by only allowing the $5k (and better) to exist. The guys who can afford the regulated machine are better off, the guys who can't are worse off. Why might I be fine with a death trap? Because its that or I lose my job, and I'm willing to take on that risk. And I'm assuming I can better gauge the meaning of that risk for myself than the governments can (whereas they have a better understanding at a macro level) Its not about safety, its about autonomy, and the belief that the government is just able to make poor decisions as you are, but their mistakes are far longer lasting, and destructive.
- oliwarner 9y ago
  Doing these "worth their cost" risk assessments where n=1 leads to its own problems. Regardless of what they considered their own skill, nobody ever died in car accident, or cut their thumb off in a table saw... until they did. It's hard to be objective about your own absolute risk factors with decades of survival bias to clamber over. And governments don't do this stuff for you, or even just the lobbyist. Injury costs the economy through lost productivity. Fatal RTAs take much longer to investigate and block critical infrastructure. Just going back to vehicles, getting $400 death traps off the road is a good thing. These are often unsafe to other people directly (heavy, no crumple zones) and indirectly through emissions. However deferred implementation of safety features (air bags, SRS, table saw brakes, etc) means that by the time they're mandatory, you can almost always find one second hand. The "death trap" category just gets safer, not more expensive.
  - setr 9y ago
    Ofc, if you believe in the free market, then n=1 calculations will naturally sort themselves out for the most part to the eventual and overall benefit of everyone, better and more efficiently than what the relatively slow-changing government will achieve except in very particular cases. And while you can still find death traps, they're now even deadlier than before because the market still exists for them, but now you can only obtain 10, 20 year old death traps, after regulation instantiates. And ofc the point of regulation is that eventually all death traps leave the used market too, and there's simply nothing at all left to serve this market. Regulation intentionally kills the market being served; ideally for longer-term macro-level benefits. Safety is not free. And governments are not infallible in their devision-making. But neither is the free market. This is the crux of the issue; it depends on who you believe is better able to make macro-level decisions: natural markets or regulatory bodies. Safety, or whatever other hot topic of the day, is just a distraction leading people to talk past each other. and it gets further confounded by current reality vs ideal. ie there's no external costs not being accounted for with the table-saw-stopper if hospitals, insurance, etc aren't being subsidized. If individuals have to pay the whole bill for their mistake, which should naturally be true in a totally free market, then it'll all sort itself out soon enough (lest the market collapse). But since in reality various costs are being subsidized/hidden by greater forces... this doesn't hold so easily. Of course, if gov interference is the primary reason for more gov interference, then you're in a positive feedback loop that probably won't take you anywhere good.
scaryspooky 9y ago
If the requirement is written in to law then the US Constitution (or other such documents granting exclusive use to an idea) must be amended to void any patent which prevents competition to meet that requirement. Volvo[1] is the a good steward in this regard, seat belt laws cover most people but the technology itself is free to implement by anyone. That's how it should be. If you can patent something that the government then mandates be included your patents must be invalidated (or you do what Volvo did voluntarily). [1] http://jalopnik.com/volvo-gave-away-their-most-important-invention-to-save-1069825878 http://jalopnik.com/volvo-gave-away-their-most-important-inv...