Live data from Hacker News

Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

maxmautner.com

51–60 of 79 posts

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#51
post #20

I cannot stand AI writing ffs.

As someone who doesn't know most of the tells but genuinely wants to know, what are some of the things that tells you it's AI-generated?

It reads like absolute dogshit.

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#52

Making cars a requirement for participating in society, across all socioeconomic levels, was a mistake. Now, lacking a car can put people into economic crisis. We can correct this by investing in public transportation and getting rid of government-provided free parking.

I agree, plus we need to make public transit safer and cleaner (I live in Los Angeles and love the metro, but it can be edgy).

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#53

Making cars a requirement for participating in society, across all socioeconomic levels, was a mistake. Now, lacking a car can put people into economic crisis. We can correct this by investing in public transportation and getting rid of government-provided free parking.

If people can’t afford to pay for an accident then they should not be driving

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who doesn't know most of the tells but genuinely wants to know, what are some of the things that tells you it's AI-generated?

There's the punctuation and word choice tells. And the overall voice. But let's set that aside because some human writing shows similar traits, or perhaps a human used an LLM to "fix the grammar". So I'll point out another tell that this article is pure slop: This article is overflowing with links, numbers, and graphs. When a human writes that densely, it takes effort to incorporate all those details. So the human on…

Interesting! Thanks for explaining!

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#55

You basically need to insure yourself when using US roads. Forget the ridiculous minimum coverage requirements, a huge percentage of Americans drive around with no insurance whatsoever -- 20% or more in some states.

In Sweden if you register a car and have no insurance you're automatically on the governments but it's 3x more expensive than normal.

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#56

Making cars a requirement for participating in society, across all socioeconomic levels, was a mistake. Now, lacking a car can put people into economic crisis. We can correct this by investing in public transportation and getting rid of government-provided free parking.

It was not a mistake, it was done deliberately.

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#57

Making cars a requirement for participating in society, across all socioeconomic levels, was a mistake. Now, lacking a car can put people into economic crisis. We can correct this by investing in public transportation and getting rid of government-provided free parking.

If people can’t afford to pay for an accident then they should not be driving

If people want to die in a ditch they should not be driving. Americans have to drive to get money and have to get money to eat.

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Forget the ridiculous minimum coverage requirements, a huge percentage of Americans drive around with no insurance whatsoever Here in New Zealand you aren’t required to have insurance at all, although every gets healthcare and lost wages paid for (ACC) in cases of injury, which is a kind of insurance.

So in order words, non-drivers are forced to subsidize drivers (who risk the lives and property of others)? Here’s a comparison of US public subsidization of the costs of driving, from the same blog: https://maxmautner.com/2026/09/10/paying-for-driving.html

Everyone benefits from a universal accident coverage scheme.

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#59
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you know insurance works by pooling and sharing the risk amongst a group? The larger the group to share the risk and cost, the more efficient it becomes. If you try to buy health insurance for all your employees as a tiny employer, costs are higher than if some employer with hundreds of thousands of employees seeks to buy the same insurance. Because that huge employer is sharing the risk of some employee having t…

So why is someone who is not an employer, subsiding other employers in their purchase of employee insurance?

What does that even mean? The insurance is for the person who gets a hand cut off in an industrial accident. It's not for the employer.

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#60
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who pays for that?

Taxpayers. Imo if we didn't have such high national debt in the US, those interest payments to the debt could have instead been used for something like national health insurance. The politicians of the past really screwed us all with the debt.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN