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Comment by phito | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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