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Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit

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Re: Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit

#171

Post by bwhite »

LyndsySimon wrote: post #148
bwhite wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there really a situation in which the punishment for killing is lighter than for wounding, especially with a weapon/vehicle?? Or are you speaking less formally: that you might never get caught for the kill if there's nobody to turn you in?

> Is there really a situation in which the punishment for killing is lighter than for wounding, especially with a weapon/vehicle? Yes. If someone breaks into your home, in most states self defense would be a slam-dunk defense against a murder charge. Even if acquited of murder, the burglar's family can sue you for wrongful death - the evidentiary bar for wrongful death is much lower than for murder. It's entirely pos…

In situations in which it is legal for you to employ deadly force, you won't be convicted of any criminal statute if you apply that force or any lesser force. That is, if you have an adequate reason to shoot to kill, a application of force which results in a wound is treated equally with one which results in death. The reverse, obviously, is not true.

In all cases, you may be sued civilly for a wrongful death, battery, or any number of other things. And lots of parties can bring the suit: the individual himself, various members of his family, your homeowners association, etc. N is fairly big, removing one of the N probably is not meaningful. Do these sort of civil suits tend to pay more for woundings than deaths? I have no data on this but would be surprised if that were the case.

I expect the only thing the OP meant is that slain person cannot testify the killer. This is self-evident but not really helpful. How is it different than "if you're going to rob someone, you should also kill them". I suppose this might be good practical, tactical advice for criminals but it isn't advancing the discussion here.

Re: Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit

#172

Post by barry-cotter »

cageface wrote: post #111
orthoganol wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived in China for a few months. The way it was explained to me was, it's you and your family, and everyone else can f * off.

Been living in Vietnam for the last five years. It's the same way here. Maybe it's the Chinese influence?

Not the Chinese influence, the Communist one. That said the morality or lack of same shown by some Chinese or Vietnamese people is far closer to the historical norm for humans than that shown by individuals in societies with rule of law. In pre state societies on average 15% of men died violently and morality was something that applied to the ingroup, not the outgroup.

For further reading on this I can highly recommend Steven Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...

Re: Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit

#173

Post by est »

matt2000 wrote: post #76

The fact that this story is the top of hacker news should indicate to us all that this site has lost what it had. How is this different than reddit? How do we want it to be different? This is simply a sensational, horrifying article that has been up voted because of its shock value. We can do better.

Most people didn't read up to the core part of the article

> In China the compensation for killing a victim in a traffic accident is relatively small—amounts typically range from $30,000 to $50,000—and once payment is made, the matter is over. By contrast, paying for lifetime care for a disabled survivor can run into the millions. The Chinese press recently described how one disabled man received about $400,000 for the first 23 years of his care

It's not some Chinese specific culture problem, it's economics.

Re: Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit

#174

Post by est »

statictype wrote: post #9
kelukelugames wrote: post #6

As a Chinese immigrant I am always baffled when Americans visit third world countries.

You're confusing "China" with "all third world countries"

Apart from tier-1 cities, China is indeed a third world country.

Re: Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit

#175

Post by undersuit »

praneshp wrote: post #147
arrayjumper wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why having insurance is a requirement for driving in most countries.

Do you think having a law is enough in a country that big? Its probably cheaper to bribe your way out after being caught than to pay the premium.

Or lie. My friend was rear ended recently. When the officer came he took both their statements and checked their insurance. She finds out after the crash the guy that rear ended her had let his car insurance lapse and lied to the officer about the validity of his coverage. Apparently the liar is also a law student at the local university.

This happened in the US and luckily my friend spent the money for uninsured motorist coverage on her policy.

Re: Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit

#176

Post by AnthonyMouse »

gburt wrote: post #74
ketralnis wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that makes the incentive to kill them instead it injur them.

Not if you set the penalty for killing even higher. The problem here is the order of the size of the penalties, not the penalty itself.

> Not if you set the penalty for killing even higher. The problem here is the order of the size of the penalties, not the penalty itself.

Increasing the penalty for the behavior the government created an incentive to engage in is completely backwards. When the source of the trouble is that the driver is stuck between a rock and a hard place, you don't improve the situation by making the hard place harder. It provides the even more perverse incentive to not only kill the victim but also any witnesses, or do other bad things in order to avoid getting caught.

Look at the root cause. You have an unexpected liability that is so large it makes the person desperate.

What you need then is mandatory insurance. Take the ruinous liability away and the motivation for killing the victim disappears.

Re: Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit

#177

Post by mwfunk »

brador wrote: post #130
sandworm101 wrote: post #49

Forgetting the laws, what sort of people can so casually kill like this? There are basic human instincts not to hurt people. Armies have to train soldiers to ignore these feelings because without training most won't kill even under combat situations. So when I see someone kill so casually I have to believe that they have rehearsed the scenario in their head beforehand. That means a large number of chinese people driv…

The same way we eat a dead cow because hey, cheap $1 protein with ketchup. It's habit and no reason to stop and think it through, plus everyone does it so it must be ok.

It's a lot more than "habit", it's downright delicious!

Re: Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit

#178

Post by barry-cotter »

maaku wrote: post #131
AdeptusAquinas wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The book Guns, germs and steel retorts that fit the majority of human history (I.e the last hundred thousand years or so) most human encounters with other humans who were not family resulted in death for one party or another. Still the case in some isolated areas. Only the growth of societies really changed that default inclination, out of necessity.

There's a book called "on killing" that you should read.

The book is based on research that was flat made up by S.L.A. Marshall. There is no evidence he ever collected the data he used to spread that myth.

On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Dave Grossman

Quote From Wikipedia

The book is based on SLA Marshall's studies from World War II, which proposed that contrary to popular perception,[1] the majority of soldiers in war do not ever fire their weapons and that this is due to an innate resistance to killing. Based on Marshall's studies the military instituted training measures to break down this resistance and successfully raised soldiers' firing rates to over ninety percent during the war in Vietnam.[2]

Below quote from http://www.warchronicle.com/us/combat_historians_wwii/marsha...

Emphasis not in original

This calculation assumes, however, that of all the questions Marshall might ask the soldiers of a rifle company during his interviews, he would unfailingly want to know who had fired his weapon and who had not. Such a question, posed interview after interview, would have signalled that Marshall was on a particular line of inquiry, and that regardless of the other information Marshall might discover, he was devoted to investigating this facet of combat performance. John Westover, usually in attendance during Marshall's sessions with the troops, does not recall Marshall's ever asking this question. Nor does Westover recall Marshall ever talking about ratios of weapons usage in their many private conversations. Marshall's own personal correspondence leaves no hint that he was ever collecting statistics. His surviving field notebooks show no signs of statistical compilations that would have been necessary to deduce a ratio as precise as Marshall reported later in Men Against Fire. The "systematic collection of data" that made Marshall's ratio of fire so authoritative appears to have been an invention.

Re: Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit

#179

Post by Qantourisc »

sandworm101 wrote: post #49

Forgetting the laws, what sort of people can so casually kill like this? There are basic human instincts not to hurt people. Armies have to train soldiers to ignore these feelings because without training most won't kill even under combat situations. So when I see someone kill so casually I have to believe that they have rehearsed the scenario in their head beforehand. That means a large number of chinese people driv…

In this case it's kill or get your life ruined/killed/become a slave to your debt.

The solution is rather simple though: make killing more expensive then injury. Best solution would be to reduce the cost of injury, and chuck the rest up to socialism. But it looks like communism China doesn't know socialism ?

Re: Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit

#180

Post by kzhahou »

The story in the intro doesnt match the well-publicized video of the accident, which is on YouTube. The driver does NOT switch into reverse, and the grandmother does not scream for the driver to stop. So unless there was another toddler run-over by a white vehicle in the same city, the driver just made shit up. WTH???
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