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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> The number of U.S. and Canadian deaths due to suffocation in refrigerators declined a significant amount in the years following federal legislation.

Who would have thought, government regulation literally can save lives.

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Seatbelts. Safety glass (not sure if that was gov reg).

Little is ever black or white. Some things are best implemented by gov, some by the marketplace.

Seatbelts were available in the mid 50s, it took until 1966 for Congress to mandate them.

Safety features in cars usually get invented before they become mandatory. Backup cameras took about a decade to become mandatory, too.

backup cameras are nice, but are marginal at best as safety features even though they're marketed heavily that way. they're for convenience, so we don't have to crane our necks when backing up or parking. seat belts, on the other hand, have easily saved thousands of lives.

point being, mandating backup cameras is an overreach of safety regulation, but not for seat belts.

The next big safety feature will be one which lowers windows in the presence of an occupant in the rear area if an occupant has not been observed in the drivers seat for x minutes if the temp is above 60F/16C for example.

While it would be obviously a good idea it will not be do-able from a technological point... first, because such a detection, most likely with cameras, would need to always run even when the car is powered off. That means a lot of electricity being wasted. Second, because it will get abused by thieves - projecting, e.g. with a laser, something onto the cameras and boom, the windows open.

Backup cameras cover a blind spot behind the car that’s large enough for a child to not be seen if you’re craning your neck the old-fashioned way. Obviously they aren’t as important as seatbelts, but the biggest improvements to a new invention tend to be the ones invented earlier anyway.

The individual who lead the effort to mandate backup cameras (after backing over and killing his son) cited ~200 deaths and 15,000 injuries, annually, mostly small children and elderly [1]. I don't know if I'd call it overreach, but I also don't know what the equation is for cost versus tragedy when looking at an issue like this.

[1] https://www.kidsandcars.org/2018/05/14/after-his-sons-tragic...

running over anyone is tragic, and i'm not trying to make light of it, but that's the same misapplication of risk, fear, and bias that lead to security theater, housing crises and regulatory capture generally.

we don't regulate for the people (US, annually) who accidentally drown in a bathtub (~300) and get injured in a bathroom (~250k), even though it would address more harms (at a larger scale and possibly greater cost, depending on the mitigations).

Tires probably saved more lives than either of those two things.

But I was told that free market solves anything and if it fails then the reason the market is not free enough.

You are being downvoted because of ill-received irony, not because it is factually wrong.

Correct: low-information snark is unpopular on HN, and I for one would like it to remain that way.

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