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Comment by hattmall | Hacker News Reader

It's seat belts. People who die in wrecks are overwhelmingly not wearing seat belts. I would think marijuana users as a group probably have average seat belt usage, but people who don't wear seat belts probably have much higher than average marijuanna usage. Roughy 92% of people wear seat belts. But that 8% of people that don't wear setbelts makes up 50% or more of all fatalities. From my personal experience it seems easy to me to assume that 90% of the people that don't wear seat belts also use marijuanna.

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I can't make sense of it mathematically. A statistical distribution fitting these characteristics does not exist.

If non-weeders have an average seat belt wearing, and if weeders also have an average seat belt wearing, then the proportion of weeders inside of the seat belt non-wearing class is just equal to the proportion of weeders inside the whole population.

How are people not wearing seatbelt? I've never seen a car that doesn't make a constant annoying noise if you're not wearing it while driving. Do they mod the car to disable this safety system? That seems too far stretched...

Older cars don't have these systems. Also they are easy to bypass with a dummy buckle. There are counties where seatbelt usage is far less common than the US.

Just click the belt in with no one occupying the seat and sit on top of it.

I never understood this though. It seems like more work and even more uncomfortable just to knowingly make things worse for yourself.

Either O B E Y or do what you named as "more work". Different person chooses different way of dealing with annoyances.

Don't fool yourself. In the end you have to obey the laws of physics and the punishment is extremely harsh and permanent.

I never agreed to be bound to some "law of conservation of momentum"! I'm a free person!

I read comment as "don't resist our egregious power, our business is to keep becoming more powerful by arguments with different persuasive power".

I have to admit, the car safety argument is among the most persuasive, like do you want to get harmed? But in reality the question is not about "harming and nothing more", the question is about growing the egregious power AND caring about the tax payers simultaneously.

Many of them stop beeping for a while (or beep way less often)

Sometimes you can change a setting in software with a programmer via the obd2 port. It's not "too far" it's easy.

But even simpler is just a pacifier. Trivial.

Then you've only ever seen fairly new, modern cars. Seatbelt warnings are a relatively new feature.

Seat belt warnings became mandatory in the USA in 1972[0]. From the mid 1970s until fairly recently, the warning tone would stop after a few seconds.

[0] https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/10832/chapter/5

Mawr’s out there driving his Model T around town.

I've known people who would just endure the warning noise until it stopped.

My parents disabled a couple by pulling a fuse or cutting a wire, but a lot of their use of the vehicles was off road at walking speeds. They wore seat belts on the road.

Many of them are just a light, and that's it. Or maybe the buzzer was burnt out lol.

I've had annoying seatbelt warnings on my cars aging back to at least the 90s.

As a reminder of how little things change. I remember watching an old video from sometime when seatbelt laws were mandated in Texas.

People were rambling on about how they basically live in the Soviet Union.

You had me until the last sentence. Your easy assumption seems nonsensical to me.

It seems much more straightforward to me to assume impairment. This is the obvious corollary, not seat belts.

It could be seat belts, of course, but I don't think that's the obvious conclusion.

The seat belts comment is so apt. We should be looking at the full population of drivers involved in accidents, not just those that went through a windshield.

Restraints play such a pivotal role in crash safety, but not wearing them isn't a meaningful indicator of impairment status.

Is this a joke?

The people who don't wear seatbelts are in my observation old folks who grew up without them or before using them was mandatory. It's just their habit.

I've almost never seen a person under about age 40 not using a seatbelt.

No. I don't know a lot of people that don't wear seatbelts, but they all smoke weed. All of my friends that died in car wrecks weren't wearing seat belts and would have definitely tested positive for THC.

I don't know any old people that don't wear seatbelts.

The people I do know that don't wear seatbelts also live pretty otherwise high risk lives, drug dealers, strippers, street gang members,etc.

While I do not commonly ride in cars driven by people outside my family, my experience has been quite the opposite: when I do ride in cars with older people, they buckle up as a matter of course, while when I ride with younger people, they are much more likely not to.

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