First came the Breathalyzer, now meet the roadside police “textalyzer”
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
What's happened to critical thinking and moderate stances? Why can't people be reasonable any more? To echo a sentiment I first read here (the provenance of which I am unsure), "Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we’ve become".
*- Distractions also include: pets, sandwiches, passengers, and beautiful people.
The only thing about your argument (and I come from this side as a motorcyclist) is the odds of 2nd hand smoke killing me is pretty low. But the danger in which you put everyone else around you is magnitudes higher by distracted driving.
The CDC states that smoking causes 480,000 deaths annually, 41,000 of which are from secondhand smoke. Dying from someone hitting you while they swill a triple mocha may sound scarier than dying from cancer, but dying is dying.
Fewer than 250 people are killed each year by semiautomatic rifles, but proportionally, we hear many thousands of times more about them. This political vitriol makes it harder to actual address problems for which the commensurate amount of effort will likely actually make a difference.
Perhaps scientists should stop finding a vaccine for Zika since it isn't as bad as cancer and other deadly diseases.
I think the actual issue is trusting the American government with our privacy. They've shown repeatedly that they don't care about it through various initiatives.
Then there's the problem of the minor issue involving a law that can be used for revenue generation.
Life and Liberty are core human rights. Sometimes a little of one must be exchanged to preserve the other. And let me be clear that I am not suggesting that we surrender all liberty to maximize safety, nor the other way around. Instead, reasonable compromises must be made.
Unfortunately, while there are units of lives to measure the one, there are no units on liberty.
But exchanging what is subjectively lots of liberty through warrantless phone searches to save a few lives is not a good choice when you also have the option to exchange a little liberty to save more lives through legislation on smoking. Yes, we could do both, but the former is a poor value and the latter is much more effective, making it not a false Appeal to Worse but an honest value comparison. And while there isn't a strictly limited budget on liberty before we reach "1984" - we can always inch fractionally closer - the same decision-making must be made.
Similar value comparisons must be made on other fronts as well: we have spent a lot of money and are very certain find that an overal cure for cancer is going to be hard to find, but it could definitely cure many people - say a 20% chance (sorry, my pessimism is showing through) that a cure can be found for $100B that will save 600,000 US deaths a year (and going back to the earlier topic, 150,000 of those are due to lung cancer...), or 5% that an additional $100B will find a cure. Contrast that to spending less than $100M for the first studies of Zika. Treatment is probably a vaccine, well understood as a tool to combat viruses, likely a just a few years out. Stopping Zika will save millions of lives. Or, alternatively, hundreds of millions of people suffer from malaria and millions die, and known treatments exist, and it's been eradicated in the US and Europe.
What would you spend the most money and liberty on? For some reason, our current answers are cancer and digital surveillance.
We get all up in arms about relatively small numbers of needless deaths and ignore any of many elephants in the room, one of which is the fact that tobacco is a huge, profitable industry that has a vast lobby and kills nearly a half-million people per year.
All I'd like to see is a sense of scale to our outrage. Both distracted driving and smoking involve personal, silly choices, both of which can kill others. One is 141x more likely to kill; let's fight that first instead of yet further eroding privacy.
The difference is that one is already illegal - stopped, as it were. I postulate that this law will not significantly reduce distracted driving, but that it will primarily serve to perpetuate our government's apparent war on privacy. To be clear: I'm perfectly fine with a warrant-based search, particularly of carrier records. All this law does is grant individual law enforcement officers yet more authority to judge and immediately punish.
If we presume a totalitarian state to begin with, then logically, it should abolish tobacco consumption before abolishing texting-while-driving, and the resources devoted to enforcing the former should be 100 times greater than those devoted to enforcing the latter.
The premise is that countermeasures should be proportional to the relative risk or impact. You could make a similar comparison between the War on Terrorism versus texting while driving, or even compare the former to putting non-slip adhesive strips in your bathtub. You could literally save more lives by buying non-slip strips for every bathtub in America, hiring professionals to install them properly, and replacing every last one of them every five years, and do it all with a fraction of the budget. But dying from a slip-and-fall accident isn't as scary as dying from a suicide bomber.
Anyway, the ultimate premise is that government should do things that make sense, which is why the argument is doomed to fail. After it has outgrown its initial idealism, a government first does the things that maintain its own dominance, and then does the things that tangibly reward its greatest supporters. Cold, hard logic does not enter into the equation.
"Think of the children" isn't really what makes some arguments for increased surveillance or safety recalls so astonishingly powerful. It's when people think of their own child or children that laws get passed.
This is scope insensitivity: human brains are just plain bad at comparing millions of abstract unwarranted searches with the thought of their child dying because of a distracted driver. (More on this at http://lesswrong.com/lw/hw/scope_insensitivity/).
This is not a problem caused by a recent or American loss of critical thinking, moderate stances, or reasonability - it's a human, ancient bias. The effect is perhaps amplified because media allows politicians to use bias more effectively, but it is not new.
If you ask me, this is just a lot of hysteria being put in the service of revenue generation and more money for our government's corporate partners.
https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2015/s6325/amendm...
I have the iPhone 6+ in a ram mount just in front of the instrument cluster so I could attempt to read it if the screen would consistently respond to my gloved finger.
My phone is typically either in the dedicated compartment in the "Infotainment Center" or in the saddlebags. I almost always have my music playing (via Bluetooth) but I can control that (skip songs, adjust volume, etc., via controls on my hand grips). Because my phone is always paired via Bluetooth, I do get the audible alert played through the stereo system when I receive an SMS message -- and the ringtone and notification on my display when I receive a phone call -- but I can't hear or read my messages through it.
After thinking about it for a moment, I don't think Siri would be able to "hear" me, though, regardless of where my phone was (I don't have a Bluetooth earpiece or anything like that and I don't wear a helmet). I'm gonna look into it, though.
Why, i'm not sure, but it's infuriating whenever i get in my Mazda that voice recognition won't work any more (the phone ignores it's mic because it's connected to bluetooth that identifies as being able to handle that, and the car won't send that info back to the phone).
The number of people in the car (i.e. whether another passenger could have been using the phone) shouldn't affect whether you have the right to the privacy of your communications and personal data on your phone.
If I want to go east, I have to take the highway. There are no other roads through the mountains for a good 50 miles north of my current location.
There's even an effort to sign post a national route system:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bicycle_Route_Sy...
To me the bigger issue is that biking or walking along a busy road is unpleasant.
To say the problem varies a lot geographically is an understatement.
This is a corruption of terminology. "Driving" in these discussions means traveling via the public road, which you do have a right to do. Using the public roads for private commerce (the original definition to "driving") is different, but nobody here is talking about that.
Do you have a source for this? It wouldn't surprise me, but it's the first I've heard of it.
Bar Receipts are used to Indict Suspect in Fatal 2013 Hit-And-Run.
>>Investigators interviewed witnesses and obtained bar receipts to determine when, where and how much McIvor had been drinking, said Sgt. Tony Landato, a Mesa police spokesman.
http://www.azcentral.com/community/mesa/articles/20140206mes...
Uh... you know they can already lock you in a cage for days or draw your blood or forcibly probe your anus, right? I think that it's a little too late for precedent.
At least with breathalyzing, it's binary. You're either drunk or you're not, there's no middle ground or room for interpretation.
In Canada, I think, penalties are doled out based on a few ranges of blood alcohol content.
As the other commenter noted, "to drunk to drive" has way more room for interpretation than "sent a text before an accident", yet the law seems to have arrived at a reasonable compromise.
Note that sending a text message via voice and is still distracted driving, and some studies show that it's just about as dangerous. It's currently legal, but some jurisdictions are contemplating banning that too.
There's zero chance of me disputing that they messed with the phone and created fake entries to bust me for causing an accident.
The cynic in me thinks these are benefits they would lose if excellent public transport was available more readily than personal vehicle transportation. Therefore, why would they be in favor of more people using public transport.
I often leave my phone at home when going on short (say, 30 minutes, tops) trips: to the grocery store, post office, bank, etc.
Statistically, I'm way more likely to be involved in a crash on one of these short trips close to my home, I've heard. Let's say that I was. How would the police know if I legitimately didn't have my phone with me or was refusing to hand it over? Short of searching both my person and my vehicle (which now gets us into other legal territory), they wouldn't know. Could I then face possible repercussions for _NOT_ having my phone with me? (i.e. "He admitted to owning a mobile phone but, when asked, refused to present it for inspection.")
Seems like too big a loophole, with no real benefits.
Could I store my smartphone in the trunk to avoid such a compelled search? Probably not, as I think about it, since they could allege I put it there after the accident took place.
I think their argument would be that even if the phone were in the trunk, you could still have been using it via Bluetooth.
IANAL, but I presume this sidesteps that by:
1. Pinky-swearing that they won't look at the individual's other data.
2. Coercing consent to a search by threatening to take away their license.
3. Performing the search before arresting so as not to get into "search incident to arrest" (SITA) territory.
Seems dubious at best.
Wow. Driving without owning and carrying a smartphone means you lose your license because you're refusing to give up a smartphone for search.
On the other hand I can get a burner bottom tier pay as you go Android for my mom and MiL, toss it in her glove compartment, and tell her to give it to the cop to keep her license if she gets in an accident. Both aren't interested in smartphones and my MiL refuses to carry any sort of phone.
I've illegally driven without a smartphone a couple times when I've forgotten it at home.
Interestingly the punishment for driving without carrying your license (wallet left at home, etc) is lower, or used to be lower, than the proposed punishment for driving without a smartphone.
Feel that? It's Thomas Jefferson spinning in his grave.