Hacker News Reader

>"Formerly wasted talent would be used in the economy, countless lives would be saved, and families and relationships would be healthier and less violent." The author really doesn't want to talk about these claims were lifted straight from Prohibition

Does this make it wrong? Both prohibition can be a failure and alcohol can ruin lives.

Its best to separate the facts from potential policies.

eh i rode motorcycles for a few years, probably 5, and had several bikes in that time, went to track days, did long solo motocamping rides as well as group rides.

while i definitely miss the feeling, i look back with horror and amazement that i ever did it, and very likely won't consider getting another bike again. i rode pretty conservatively the great majority of the time, but the culture is so provocative it's so fucking hard to be completely strict about it. my last bike was a big adventure bike, not a track bike, so it's not like i was squidding around on a gsxr the whole time.

this basically completely parallels my journey with alcohol. i don't drink anymore and never came anywhere close to alcoholism, but it was a pervasive and toxic substance and culture that i didn't really enjoy participating in anymore. i now have many other good options and hell even the craft NA beer options are growing quite well.

> Motorcycles are 20 times as deadly as cars to the rider - but I don't believe the government has any role in shutting them down.

This is not entirely the same situation, since alcohol abuse also affects the abusers family. The article mentions that as well.

TLDR : 1 - Some human action have negative consequence affecting other human being, or even have a high probabilities to generate consequences not bored by the person. That's why you can't "drink and drive" even if you havent (yet!) caused any accident. 2 - It's okay for society to prescribe (either by social norms or law) behavior that are dimmed beneficial. Of course this can and has gone very bad, but this everybody does what they want fundamentally doesn't scale neither

> I simultaneously don't think society has a role in restricting it more than presently, at least in the US.

Restricting maybe not, but strongly discouraging as well as informing the public of the strong negative consequences should be fair game.

> It turns out humans who don't care about wasting talent like wasting it any way they can; be it alcohol, drugs, video games, gang violence, take your pick.

IMO, a lot of things wrong here. I don't think there is a line somewhere that clearly separate the talent waster to the productive people. Human usually respond (albeit differently) to incentive structure. The point of those intervention is change the incentive structure of the environment to make the desired behavior a bit more common.

> Motorcycles are 20 times as deadly as cars to the rider - but I don't believe the government has any role in shutting them down.

Motorcycles seems to be "obvisouly" dangerous that most poeple do not drive them. Same reason we do not regulate rope-jumping : The impact on society is not that high. If/When the amount of people driving motorcyles increases as to become a problem, then more regulation might be needed.

> or example, the requirements for lots of new safety equipment in new cars has been shown to have significantly priced out poorer communities, causing them to opt for cheaper, older, even more dangerous vehicles.

First, references ? Second then let's make those things offorable for the target population... Let's not make life unsafe for everybody else...

> Fourth, I think is honestly stupid that he factors drugs in as an example of how "we can ban drugs - why not alcohol?"

Because they are both (potentially) addictive substances...