Its not social darwinism, the lack of critical thinking skills among the general population is alarming. Americans have apparently been coddled to the point that they arent worried about basic needs; if you go to buy a car you should have some simple considerations, is this car safe? What are the typical maintenance costs? Is it common for this car to be stolen?
Things like, housing, transportation, education, those are really central aspects of peoples lives. Its all well and good that you want to draw symbols on paper and make all these things safe, but it appears to have come at a pretty serious cost. That cost, is the inability for the US population to use critical thinking.
I don't understand your argument. Do you expect every potential car buyer regardless of tech literacy to go to a dealership with an SDR setup on-hand, asking if they could test-out the key fobs, capture some signals, try to figure them out and look for common vulnerabilities on the new models? Do you expect the seller to explain the technical details of the key fobs at a depth you can be sure there's no vulnerabilities?
Determining that the key fobs were implemented securely is not something the buyer or even the seller will be able to determine. I would imagine a regulator has the ability to inspect them as they're being designed/built.
> if you go to buy a car you should have some simple considerations [...] Is it common for this car to be stolen?
By the time vulnerabilities are found and people start stealing them, there should already be plenty sold and roaming the streets.
The negligence you speak of, how widespread would you say it is? Would you say the EPA dropped the ball preventing the east Palestine Ohio train derailment? Would you say that having some hard cutoff for how many chemical train cars until the train is reclassified? I imagine you would agree, that the chemical company sending 59 (oh w/e) train cars instead of 60 so that they are under easier rules, is kind of bullshit.
If the company is following the rules then they can largely get away with it when things go wrong; if that company had actual liability for whats in the train cars, then they would have insurance. That insurance would be prorated on the safety profile of the train, and it would fix the hazzard or pay the claimants their due. These regulations only exist to cement decrepit companies monopoly over you.
I have no faith that "negligence" in the public sector will improve. The roads, the enforcement of driving conduct, that will not improve. The safety, security, and reliability of cars will improve, because there is still competition from self aware drivers.
Weird takeaway. Those aren't primarily places with security measures, they're places where trusted people outweigh untrusted ones.
I'm not super familiar with the East Palestine derailment, but based on what I do know about it I think your 59/60 train cars example is sort of disingenuous. American freight rail operators are well known for skimping on safety in multiple dimensions; issues like obsolete brake technology, stretched-thin crews, insufficient maintenance, and excessively long/heavy trains have all been discussed to death before and after that accident. The problem isn't some off-by-one miscalibration, but rather that our regulators (and I'm including lawmakers under that umbrella, especially since they're usually the ones taking the bribes AFAIK) are simply not willing to demand that these industries put public safety over profits in areas where there are well-understood systemic safety problems. AIUI, efforts to improve rail safety during the 2010s and earlier have been largely stillborn, sabotaged by rail company lobbying.
Just to illustrate what I'm talking about via another example: if the MCAS system that killed 346 passengers on two 737 Max aircraft within the span of a few months had been an honest design flaw rather than a hack devised to juice sales by dodging retraining requirements, cheaply and shoddily implemented ignoring the misgivings of Boeing personnel and rubber-stamped by the FAA, then it would have been a simple tragedy. As it actually happened, it's an atrocity—a failure on multiple levels by many people who ought to have known better, holes in the Swiss cheese all lining up, 346 lives sacrificed on the altar of avarice. That's where the invisible hand gets you when you let it take the wheel, but I suppose next you'll tell me that those people ought to have done their own safety audits of the aircraft that got them killed.
Its about who is signing off on whats safe. The government has proven that thry are at best incompetent, they do not have the incentive. A private company has to maintain their reputation through quality of service, they dont have the seemingly endless faith of people because they are "government".
I don't assume this and I don't think I have even slightly implied that I do. It's obviously, trivially, verifiably false.
Your mistake is in assuming that cost is the primary motivating factor for consumers^[1], and that corporations and their stakeholders won't favor paying higher insurance costs (and fines, etc.) today over paying even more toward safety improvements that won't break even wrt. insurance costs for many years. As I mentioned above, the observable state of the real world explicitly disproves the claim that market forces will drive positive trends in safety outcomes.
^[1] Look how many huge, expensive pickup trucks are on the road in America today. Look at the monthly payments their owners are enduring to satisfy their vanity; look at their spotless paintjobs, empty beds (except perhaps the token equally spotless toolbox), and mud-free fenders.
Put it another way: if it's all market based, your choices in buying just get 2x more complex. Is this car easily unlocked? Do the brakes often fail? Can it resist a collision?
Or even another thought: since most people don't think about security, companies will flood the market with insecure cars. Want a secure car? That would be niche and cost you double.
i think this issue is overblown and is being used as a smokescreen for the rash of vehicle thefts caused, not by bad kia security, but large-scale organized crime.
Jewelry, TV’s, bitcoin wallets etc aren’t just left in the open. Your house, front lawn etc is valuable and accessible but not generally mobile.
If you just roll in and let the salesman take you for a ride then you deserve the outcome.
/sarcasm
and not knowing even that simple fact is what makes it "deservedly" so.
(And if you say you mean outside of regulation, that people need to be responsible in general for other aspects of life, then your argument is no longer connected to the original comment you replied to.)
i'm definitely not deluding myself. that is life. you need to have both the freedom and the inclination to take care of yourself, if you don't have both you'll suffer.
Mandating basic safety and security features is not always going to protect me, but it will mostly protect me. It's not stupid to want that tradeoff. I don't care if you define "fix" as 100% so therefore it's not a fix. I want the 95%. I want defense in depth, regulation on top of personal investigation.
you need the right to decide for yourself if the lock is defective or not.
if you give that away, you will instantly be given the "freedom" to buy a lock that is defective-by-design. perhaps the lock designer's brother is a friend of the govt. perhaps the govt. agency does not want bad publicity, whatever.
the point is "defense-in-depth" (cliche) or not, you are ultimately responsible for you. there can be no other way.
> you need the right to decide for yourself if the lock is defective or not.
This sounds like you agree with me. This kind of regulation sets a minimum, not a maximum.
We don't need freedom to buy very bad locks. We do need freedom to buy the best lock we want to buy.
But the rest of your post implies that regulation will change both minimum and maximum and mandate a specific lock. I disagree with that premise.
> (cliche)
Are you trying to imply something there?
> you are ultimately responsible for you. there can be no other way.
I am "ultimately" responsible, but product makers should have responsibilities too. If I fail at something, I should not be 0% safe. The baseline should be pretty high before I apply my own efforts.
This may be the "age of information", but information is only useful as your ability to find, understand, and evaluate it.
I bet you had to know exactly what to look for, and "problems with kias" wouldn't get the average person there.
Sure, it sucks that you have to unexpectedly spend money on it, but when you bought a cheap car you knew you were taking the risk of having to deal with unknown unknowns.
The age of information was great.
In the age of misinformation, knowledge outside your specialty is no longer cheap enough to reliably obtain.