CoggyMcFee @ CoggyMcFee @lemmy.world

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533

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2 yr. ago

While I agree that it would certainly be ideal if a speed limiter could account for the context that the car is in, you’ve missed a lot in drawing your conclusion that it would be useless without being able to do that.

Hitting a pedestrian is not the only type of accident. If you rear end a car going 25 mph at 70mph it is not a guaranteed death sentence for all. Especially if the driver brakes, which some do not, but some will. And this is ignoring cases where there isn’t a tremendous mismatch in speed. Like, even if it reduced residential deaths by 0% but it reduced overall deaths looking at all situations, it would be a net gain with literally nothing lost. We are looking at the aggregate here. So, it isn’t relevant if you think of one specific situation where you believe 70mph isn’t better than 90mph or whatever number.

Reaction time and braking distance are affected by speed. In some cases, the person going 70 might be able to slow down enough to have the collision be non-fatal. Reaction time goes down and braking distance goes up as speed increases. If a speed limiter gives just enough time to occasionally make an accident non-fatal, then in the aggregate you have fewer fatal accidents.

In fact, taking braking distance into account, I don’t think you can even say that over the millions of miles driven, that a speed maxed at 70mph isn’t going to, occasionally, lead to a situation in a residential area where someone was able to just get out of the way in time because the car covered 30% less distance between the time the pedestrian reacted and the time the car reached that spot (or an even larger difference if the driver noticed and braked at some point as well). But again, it doesn’t matter if it’s few to none in this specific scenario, because a speed limiter of 70 will certainly reduce fatalities overall.

You can certainly kill someone going the maximum legal speed in a place where the speed limit is much lower. But the likelihood of injury and death still does increase with the increase in speed. So if, say, 5% of accidents involving someone going 70 are fatal, but 10% if the person is going 90 (these are made-up numbers), then if cars are not even able to go above 70, you end up saving lives.

Wow, that is exactly the opposite expectation and take from me. If young people don’t show up to vote, I expect they’ll blame the DNC instead of themselves, even though the purpose of voting is getting the best outcome for your future and not about liking people or being sold on a brand.

Doesn’t it make the most sense to blame our election system that makes people feel like they don’t have enough choice or the ability to express their actual preference in an election?

The Democratic Party is a product of this flawed system. You can make things a bit better, but at the end of the day, you have to have a party that is a coalition of disparate groups that choose a single person who has to win it all. So, a candidate that super excites and energizes one faction of the coalition is likely to be very unappealing to other factions. And most of the time you’re going to end up with someone who nobody is actually excited for. It would be great if Democrats had a preferential/ranked voting system for determining that one candidate, which allowed for many candidates, and for those candidates to stay in the race without the risk of cannibalizing others (e.g. having both Warren and Bernie wouldn’t detract from either one). However, even this isn’t determined centrally by the party, as each state gets to do voting the way they want to. So, it’s not an easy problem to solve.

It seems to me that the question of free will is only truly meaningful (aside from being an interesting thought experiment) if we could then perfectly or near-perfectly predict what a person will do. But the system in which we exist is so complex that we will never be able to model that or come close.

So we might as well consider humans to have free will, just as we consider a roll of the dice to be random.

When people talk about that Biden is going to lose and blame it on him, I really wonder if they understand what our system is and what the stakes are. We only lose if people decide not to vote for Biden. There are things that a good candidate can do to excite their voters and motivate people, but at the end of the day, anyone can see the options that lay before them and choose regardless of what the campaign does.

You can wish that the campaign/candidate were better so that it made the job of motivating people easier. But if you are worried about the consequences of Trump winning this election, then you should be trying to motivate people to vote Biden. The article is to remind people that while Biden fared poorly at the debate, Trump was actually worse and is always worse. It seems to me that this is an honest point that underscores the need to vote Biden in this election, despite any of his shortcomings.

We are driving down a road and a semi is coming straight at us at 100 mph. We can either veer off the road and damage or even total our car on whatever is there, or we can say “I shouldn’t have to veer off the road, there should be a shoulder”, or even “I didn’t even want to take this route in the first place but my wife insisted” as the truck hits us head on. There’s no good option, but there’s a clear survival option.

Instead of store hours like this:

• Monday 6:00-18:00
• Tuesday 6:00-18:00
• Wednesday 8:00-18:00
• Thursday 6:00-18:00
• Friday 6:00-18:00

We can have store hours like this:

• Sunday 22:00-Monday 10:00
• Monday 22:00-Tuesday 10:00
• Wednesday 0:00-10:00
• Wednesday 22:00-Thursday 10:00
• Thursday 22:00- Friday 10:00

Boy, I would love to live in a place where store hours would be like this. So convenient.

And I’d love to have the change in the day be sometime in the middle of the day so that “see you tomorrow” means sometime later in the day. Or maybe different areas would use different conventions to refer to the time when the sun is out and most people are doing things and the time when most people are asleep.

It would also be so pleasant and relaxing to visit a new country and constantly have to calculate the country’s time offset in my head. There would probably be an app on my phone that I would constantly look at that would convert the time where I am to the equivalent time I am used to. I won’t have a sense of when meals are or when I should expect stores to be open, or when it’s reasonable to wake up without converting to the time I’m used to. Some might say the thing I’m used to is my time “zone”.

It would also be great for TV shows and books to always run into issues when talking about the time because there’s no universal reference.

Even the actual convenience of scheduling a meeting with people in different parts of the world has issues. Now, you know that whatever time you say is the time for all people. But instead of being able to just look up each person’s time zone and see “oh, it would be 3am there, so they’d be asleep”, you’d have to go to some website that tells you what time most people sleep or what time most people eat meals, or whatever, and see by how many hours it differs.

Sorry, I was just attempting to make a joke, nothing more than that!

So you’re saying it’s his turn

I’ve spent the past decade thinking “surely they won’t get worse than this” and they always do

So, let’s just strengthen that outrage muscle then, huh?

I bet you’re going to tell me you read it somewhere

Fair enough! Not that I think it means Obama-McCain fits into the dumb-smart dichotomy.

Are you talking about the debate with Mitt Romney?

I understand how it’s procedurally possible to do. But why would everyone accept having the delegates at the convention just vote for some random person that the people didn’t get to vote on themselves? People around here talk about how the 2016 primary was so undemocratic because they had stuff like superdelegates, but at the end of the day the process was actually pretty democratic, unlike choosing someone totally unrelated after the primaries.

To me, Harris is the only one you could just put in place and say this is still the ticket you voted for. Anyone else, I don’t know how you pull it off.

The Republicans really got just what they wanted out of people like you with what they did in Congress with the border. There is a legit crisis down there now. And there was an agreed-to, bipartisan border bill ready to go, and at the last moment Trump said to tank it because it will reflect well on the Democrats. So they tanked it, leaving Biden’s executive branch with very limited options to do anything. So he is doing one of the crappy few things he can do, and people like you just pin it to Biden, which is just what Trump and the GOP hoped for.

I have wondered how it would be possible to change the ticket into anyone else but Harris at this late stage. There is no time to do a new set of primaries. Harris is at least the VP on the ticket and the person whose job it would be to step in for Biden anyway.

How could he just designate some random person and everyone who voted Biden just has to go with it?

Poe’s Law

My kid calls it a plane station and frankly it’s growing on me

The Spanish Invasion (of privacy)?