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I’d really prefer not to kill anybody else I’m sharing the road with, all else equal. It would be quite traumatic for that persons family and for me too.

• renewiltord 3y ago
  True. Which is why I would like to make it the law that all motor vehicle occupants should wear helmets. This will mean saving billions of life years lost through traumatic brain injuries.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • HWR_14 3y ago
    What if the helmets were giant (unlike bike helmets, the rider doesn't have to carry the entire weight or air resistance). Then, instead of filling the helmets with hard styrofoam, we could fill them with something even softer, maybe a compressible gas. People could obviously store them in the vehicle. It might be annoying to wear them all the time, so we could mandate that cars detect when you are about to be in a crash and slam a helmet on your head. Although, come to think of it, it doesn't need to surround your whole head. What if we could make it just appear between your head and anything you were going to hit. Hey, we could even have those things hold the micro helmets. Since they are filled with air, we can use air pressure to deploy them fast, these flexible bags of air.
    • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      You're kind of making their point for them. It's dumb to mandate helmets or any other specific technology because it removes the possibility for something better or for context-based decisionmaking. Suppose you ride your motorcycle into the desert and then lose your helmet into a canyon. Your phone is dead. Your choices are a thirty hour walk out of the desert which might cause you to die of dehydration, or riding your motorcycle without a helmet. Should you get a ticket for making the obvious choice?
      • Shaanie 3y ago
        You can make the exact same example, except someone without a driving license finds a car. I doubt you're opposed to mandating driver licenses, though.
        • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
          You're not making the point you think you are. All a driver license proves is that you took a basic class as a teenager and have been paying the government a fee since then. You could get the same benefit just by adding the class to the high school curriculum.
          • defrost 3y ago
            > You could get the same benefit just by adding the class to the high school curriculum. This doesn't contribute to the upkeep of roads in the same manner as a yearly tax on those that use them. So no, not the same benefit at all.
            • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
              You're thinking of car tax and fuel tax. But also, the value of roads scales poorly with any of these things. The ability to have a package delivered to your front door is valuable regardless of whether or not you even have a car, and the value of it depends on what's in it rather than how much the truck cost. The most sensible way to fund any kind of basic infrastructure is from general revenues.
              • defrost 3y ago
                Is it telepathy that allows you to claim that you know what I'm thinking? I'm stating that a number of charges go towards the upkeep of roads and related services (at least in the country I'm present in) these charges include driver and vehicle licences, fuel taxes, etc. > So the most sensible way to .. Proposing an alternative doesn't negate the present practices, moreover it makes sense that as much of the public cost associated with roads should come from those that use the roads the most.
    • renewiltord 3y ago
      Helmets are still advantageous and will continue to abate TBIs in that tool regimen. In addition, helmets can be used in a backwards compatible way to increase safety in older cars (which make up a very large fraction of vehicles on the street).