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"Luxury Goods." Tell that to the poor person who needs one to get to work, the store, or the doctor, see what kind of reaction you get. It's fine and dandy fo

by Aloha 5y ago

"Luxury Goods." Tell that to the poor person who needs one to get to work, the store, or the doctor, see what kind of reaction you get. It's fine and dandy for all of us who make a high-dollar salary to sit here and moralize, "yes, tax cars more" when we can well pay the higher taxes, and it will relegate the poor to the bus, where instead of a 15 minute trip home, they'll have a 2 hour trip home by bus after 8 hours on their feet at a service job. Like it or not, much of the world has locked itself into a personal transportation oriented society, where you can transport yourself at your own discretion anywhere you'd like to go whenever you'd like to go there - they key for the future is to make that lifestyle more sustainable for the planet, not to sit here and moralize about it. Also, I was off with the numbers "For example, In 2014 the NHTSA required all new cars to be sold with a backup camera - at an estimated cost of up to 143 dollars a car. In 2016 we sold 17,500,000 cars - if you add 100 dollars to the price of each car sold, you're looking at an extra 1,750,000,000 or 1.75 billion dollars, annually - to save 210 lives - in short 8.3 million dollars per life saved - even if you look at just injuries from accidental backing incidents, there were 15,000 of those in 2014 - you're still looking at 116,000 dollars spent per injury prevented - and this presumes this technology prevents every death, and every injury from accidental backing - Is this a worthy expenditure my gut tells me no (but I might be a cold hearted bastard) - I can just think of better ways to spend 1.75 billion dollars in the public good - an education campaign, and requiring a label, or warning sign to flash in the car would cost far less and probably save about as many lives."

Aunche 5y ago
Yes, that's why I prefaced my statement with "in an ideal world." Obviously we would need better public transit and urban planning before we can tax cars to oblivion. 8.3 million is still less than the 10 million that the DoT prices for an infrastructure proposal will save a life, so I'd still say the money at least wasn't wasted. It's debatable whether it was actually worth it, but consider that if we were purely utilitarian, we would all be like Bill Gates and prioritize eradicating malaria.
- Aloha 5y ago
  The costs to replace everything we have and force people to change behaviors are basically so large as to be impossible to calculate, or frankly pay for. This isn't software where you can engineer your way out of technical debt, the debt is baked into concrete, steel and psychological behaviors. Of those, I'd note the hardest one to change is that last one, it prevents the trillions from being spent to change the first two. I'd also like to note, it's not a one time charge. It's 1.75b dollars a year ongoing in perpetuity, that's what bothers me, are there not other things we could spend 1.75b dollars a year on, that are more worthy? How many busses could 1.75b dollars a year buy? In the end, our focus on what people perceive as perfection in urban development, gets in the way of making what we have more sustainable and incrementally better, which costs less, and sees much more immediate results.

by Aloha 5y ago

Aunche 5y ago

Yes, that's why I prefaced my statement with "in an ideal world." Obviously we would need better public transit and urban planning before we can tax cars to oblivion. 8.3 million is still less than the 10 million that the DoT prices for an infrastructure proposal will save a life, so I'd still say the money at least wasn't wasted. It's debatable whether it was actually worth it, but consider that if we were purely utilitarian, we would all be like Bill Gates and prioritize eradicating malaria.

Aloha 5y ago
The costs to replace everything we have and force people to change behaviors are basically so large as to be impossible to calculate, or frankly pay for. This isn't software where you can engineer your way out of technical debt, the debt is baked into concrete, steel and psychological behaviors. Of those, I'd note the hardest one to change is that last one, it prevents the trillions from being spent to change the first two. I'd also like to note, it's not a one time charge. It's 1.75b dollars a year ongoing in perpetuity, that's what bothers me, are there not other things we could spend 1.75b dollars a year on, that are more worthy? How many busses could 1.75b dollars a year buy? In the end, our focus on what people perceive as perfection in urban development, gets in the way of making what we have more sustainable and incrementally better, which costs less, and sees much more immediate results.