801–810 of 954 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because everybody else is doing it doesn't mean you have to as well.
Except that driving at a speed significantly different from the surrounding traffic increases the risk of a crash.
Tailgating is one of the leading causes of non-fatal accidents.
Sounds like it's safer for me to let people tailgate me at the speed limit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be frank, it hardly seems to have helped the United States out of their current constitutional crisis. Compulsory preferential voting is a much better protection against tyrants.
> Compulsory preferential voting is a much better protection against tyrants. This guarantees worse outcomes. You will be effectively forcing people to participate that typically don't care about politics and will be ignorant of many of the issues they are voting on. The reality is that most elections are won in the same way the X-Factor, or "I'm a celebrity get me out of here". It is nothing more than a popularity c…
[Citation needed]
An opposite argument is that compulsory voting smooths out or buffers the extreme radical urgency of any faction that might, in the right circumstances, carry the day in a low-turnout election.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[citation needed] Would-be tyrants get power (and stay in power) by gaining the support of people capable of projecting force and power onto the populace. From the perspective of tyranny, it is irrelevant if their supporters are i.e. the military or a bunch of militia guys who have acquired their guns privately. Source: Many, many civil wars across history. Trying to guard against tyranny by increasing private gun ow…
>Trying to guard against tyranny by increasing private gun ownership is dumb Worked once
On the other hand, there are literally dozens of examples of civil society organizations organizations and protest movements successfully countering government overreach or military coup d'etats with peaceful means and bringing about profound political change:
- US civil rights movement
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnation_Revolution
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_(Polish_trade_union...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful_Revolution
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_transition_to_democrac...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilean_transition_to_democrac...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quit_India_Movement
Just to name a few.
While armed resistance against injustice can sometimes be effective (and certainly not all peaceful movements succeed), there is well established qualitative and quantitate research that violence comes at much higher cost (in terms of life lost) and risks (to subsequent democratic and evononomic development) than peaceful resistance. Erica Chenoweth is one particular scholar worth checking out in that regard: https://www.ericachenoweth.com
It makes sense if you think about it for a second: resisting violently against tyranny requires you to build up systems of violence (duh!). Those systems have the tendency to stick around, even if you are successful in removing or fending off tyranny.
You can see this live in the US, if you are willing to look: Tens of thousands of people die every year solely because the US treats firearms differently from the entirety of the rest of humanity. At the same time, the US does not seem to be uniquely resistant to the undermining of democratic institutions, as Trumps current antics demonstrate (this should hold true no matter which side of the Trump/Democrats divide you sit on. Both sides claim that the other is (successfully) undermining democracy).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s a straw man. Nobody is saying Germans have some “safe driving” gene, but rather that German culture has higher standards for driver training and enforcement. I’m sure that if the United States would see incident rates decline significantly if we made drivers licenses harder to get and easier to lose before a fatality, or simply ended our effective trillion-dollar annual subsidy of driving and required people t…
The way he worded his reply suggested some sort of intrinsic superiority that by definition could not be replicated anywhere else. That said, if we can replicate Germany’s success in vehicle safety in the U.S., we should, yet discussion on vehicle safety seems to justify increasingly draconian bandaids on the status quo rather than just mimicking what the Germans do. It is also easy to say that they have higher stand…
This is something you read into the comment. Given how Germany is tied with Japan for the assumption that they place a higher priority on attention to detail and safety culturally, I would suggest the more parsimonious explanation thar they were simply echoing a stereotype Americans have observed for at least a century.
While you’re apparently very proud of NYS you’re simply drawing a false equivalence. Perhaps NY is above average for the United States but having driven there many times I had to laugh at the idea that the bar is very high having seen people grossly speeding, running red lights, using the highway should or parking lanes to pass illegally, driving around with illegally tinted dark windows, double parking, or parking on the sidewalk. Even if I ignore upstate and only compare NYC to Munich, it’s not even in the same league – especially since some of the biggest scofflaws around NYC are the cops who park their personal vehicles blocking the sidewalks and are clearly more interested in hassling pedestrians and bicyclists.
On to insurance, it is simultaneously possible for NYS to have higher insurance requirements and still be lower than what’s needed. American healthcare is significantly more expensive than our peer countries so we need much higher insurance to compensate the people hit by drivers, especially because private insurance means a massive cost problem if the victim is unable to work. Studies have estimated that Americans subsidize driving by roughly a trillion dollars a year by not requiring drivers to pay for their choices, so even the most expensive states aren’t high enough.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/01/18/why-car-i...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this merely adding a device to a criminal’s vehicle? What stops manufacturers from including speed limiters by default to make it easier to retrofit cars? Then what stops a switch from being flipped to enable it for all cars regardless of “criminal” status? Unlike breathalyzers, which had an economic barrier from reaching step 2, a software limiter has no economic barrier. A user controllable software limiter is a…
>>Is this merely adding a device to a criminal’s vehicle? For the topic of the post, YES The article was specifically about laws allowing a JUDGE to add a device to a specific convicted person's vehicle for a limited time. OF COURSE there is the slippery-slope argument you describe very well. The slippery slope danger is real, and I've stated that I oppose any motion down it. But I also oppose posts which wrongly scr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve never met a person taking high risk actions who thinks they are unqualified to do so. But they always think some other people are.
This whole thread confirms it. Speed limits are always a burden for reckless drivers, but never an issue for people like me who drive under the limit. They should reflect on themselves about that but I doubt they are capable of it.
If you are doing 45 on a California freeway, YOU are the danger. Not the car going 75. You.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Even though most of us don't speed. I visited California once and was going from LAX to Kings Canyon National Park. I was driving the speed limit (I wasn't in any hurry) and got passed by literally everyone on the road. The vast majority of people drive faster than the speed limit. The question is "how much" over the speed limit you can comfortably go before you run the risk of being stopped and fined. Repeat offen…
That's one thing I found weird driving in the US. Everyone consistently drove about 5 mph above the speed limit, which I ended up doing too as driving at the speed limit felt like being a nuisance, and was probably less safe too. I remember joking that American are so much into tipping that they even tip speed limits. But why? If people, including law enforcement are comfortable with doing 70mph on 65mph roads, why n…
This unofficial leeway likely developed due to things like mechanical issues with speedometers and tires causing reasonable doubt about actual speed within a few MPH. If they were to raise the official speed limit by 5-10MPH, then people would just do 5-10MPH above that. If police then started enforcing much more strictly, you're going to jam up the courts with more people contesting a 1mph over ticket as being due to speedometer calibration or whatever. Or just in general being much more resentful of the police for being so draconian.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That’s great, good for New York. Now go get Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Washington to do the same. Also, remember that licensing reciprocity means that if I have a vehicle titled in South Carolina, nothing stops me from driving it into North Carolina. Germany is no different. There is licensing reciprocity with the rest of the EU…
> If a significant percentage of vehicles are deemed unsafe to drive because of this, then removing them from the road would be a good thing. “Good” is not a binary state, and it’s also wildly subjective. If by removing 100,000 unsafe cars from the road, you prevented 10,000 vehicle collisions, but 20,000 people became impoverished, is that good? It depends on your point of view. New York State, being largely dominat…
You can read about the 85th percentile principle here:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=85th+percentile+speed
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=85th+percentile+speed
I actually cannot check the second since Google is blocking queries from the iCloud Private relay, but I assume it will give you a list of scholarly work on the subject. As for the autobahn, Wikipedia has some numbers from 2012:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn#Safety
1.74 fatalities per billion vehicle km on the autobahn versus 3.38 for US highways. There is evidence that introducing speed limits of around 80mph (130km/h, well above the speeds used drivers drive on most U.S. roads) on the autobahn would further lower it. The paradoxical situation where high speeds on the autobahn are safe and low speed limits on US highways are unsafe would be explained by the 85th percentile principle.
Thank God. People on the roads are extremely reckless and we don't do anything about it. Our highways are lawless for the most part. People can drive however they feel like it. You literally have to kill someone AND be drunk before you actually get in trouble and are locked up. If you kill someone sober though, it's totally fine under our current system. In my opinion, if you get caught driving recklessly, the punish…
>Our highways are lawless for the most part. People can drive however they feel like it. You literally have to kill someone AND be drunk before you actually get in trouble and are locked up. You don't know what you are saying. Virginia already has the strongest speeding laws in the entire United States. Doing 20 over is a criminal act, and entire law practices exist due to Virginia' speed laws. https://law.lis.virgin…
Absolutely. Grew up in VA a few generations ago and it was just as strict then. Compared to everywhere else I've lived - Virginia is Police Everywhere, All The Time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[citation needed] Would-be tyrants get power (and stay in power) by gaining the support of people capable of projecting force and power onto the populace. From the perspective of tyranny, it is irrelevant if their supporters are i.e. the military or a bunch of militia guys who have acquired their guns privately. Source: Many, many civil wars across history. Trying to guard against tyranny by increasing private gun ow…
Trying to guard against tyranny by increasing private gun ownership is dumb, because you are simply creating another group of people that would-be tyrants can use to gain and retain power. Is there any example of a widely armed society that nevertheless succumbed to classical authoritarianism from the inside? AFAIK even the European societies that have a lot of guns in hands of civilians (hunting or others), such as…
Plenty. The population of the Weimar Republic was pretty militarized (lots of WWI veterans with combat experience and plenty of activity of "Freikorps" militia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freikorps#Freikorps_involvemen...). These militant and armed forces largely threw in with the Nazi political movement and contributed to the collapse of the first German democracy and the institutionalization of the Nazi Reich. Just to make one very obvious example.