Why You Have to Wear a Seat Belt, but Can Drive a Motorcycle
mitchkirby.com
mitchkirby.com
There's no equivalent on a motorcycle that checks both those boxes other than the helmet laws we already have in many places.
There's no inconsistency here, it's the same philosophy but the outcomes are different because the situations are different.
I don't agree with that at all. There are too many opportunities for police to stop motorists, which they use to pivot and further impinge upon peoples' freedom. It is a common tactic for police to stop motorists for any of a number of reasons such as this reason as a tactic to initiate a search of their vehicle, and record the identities of driver and passengers. I am glad that cars are equipped with seat belts, and of course it is wise to use them; but I disagree that the state has much or any legitimacy in stopping a motorist who was causing no negative effect on other motorists simply because their seat belt was not visible. At its worst (and commonly) the seat belt requirement is abused by greedy entities to drum up extra revenue to which they would otherwise not be entitled.
I think though, you may be slightly misunderstanding my point: Wearing a seatbelt doesn't significantly reduce your freedom in any real way. It's not hard to comply with the law, it doesn't cost you time or money and it doesn't effect any of our other freedoms significantly.
To your point though: NOT wearing your belt is something that can land you in situations that put you at risk of abuse to your freedoms.
I agree. I wear my seat belt. I think it is foolish not to do so. I also think it is a driver's right to decide that; and that a driver's failure to wear the seat belt does not harm others in any appreciable way. It's also not a requirement to fail to wear your seat belt in order for an officer to stop you, s/he only needs to fail to notice your seat belt.
Absolutely. Such an inexpensive piece of safety equipment.
No, because putting consistency over correctness means instead of some right and some wrong, you've either got 100% right (not possible in our world) or 100% wrong.
Besides that, consider that a state's laws are supposed to be an expression of the values of their people, and it's entirely reasonable that a state might tax cigarettes and alcohol differently, or have different laws for cars and motorcycles. Depends on what the people want.
(And, anyhow, what actually is being discussed isn't actual consistency or inconsistency in the law, but the ability to construct a consistent set of principles supporting the law that is more general than the specific laws that the principles support. The issue isn't that the laws at issue are actually inconsistent, is that the author feels that the specific laws should be justified by more general principles than the laws themselves, and that (for the laws in question) those principles should address only the degree of danger of the activity, and the more general principles the author infers from each of the laws in question, based on the premise that the justifying principle must consider only safety, are when taken together, are inconsistent. This isn't really about consistency, its about whether the actual content of the law fits a particular preference of the author which involves more than just logical consistency.)
"Hillary Clinton is exactly 8 years old", "Hillary Clinton is exactly 9 years old".
A collection of statements, all of which are false, is not guaranteed to be consistent.
Hmm. You are right, to be sure. I guess I was carelessly generalising from the fact that anything follows from a false statement.
This is indeed precisely what I meant by "anything (Y) follows from a false statement (X)"—although maybe "everything follows from a false statement" sounds better. This is precisely why an inconsistent logic can prove everything.
This principle is sometimes also called ex falso quodlibet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_falso_quodlibet). Of course, giving it another name doesn't make it any more (or less) true, but it may make it sound more familiar and less dodgy! I know I muffed up the first statement pretty badly, which doesn't inspire confidence; but, as a mathematician, I'm pretty sure about this one. :-)
"Norm said 2+2=4"
"Norm said 2+2=5"
It is true Norm said both those things. Norm's ability to do arithmetic (or possibly tell the truth, or etc) is not consistent.
The statements "Norm said '2 + 2 = 4'" and "Norm said '2 + 2 = 5'" are consistent. (A sufficient but not necessary definition of consistency of a collection of statements is that there is a model—let's leave the meaning of that vague—in which they hold. If we are sufficiently vague about what 'model' means, then we may take the real world to be one.) As you say, together (if true, and if taken to be true expressions of Norm's beliefs) these consistent statements imply the inconsistency of Norm's beliefs. That is a good thing; it is useful to be able to judge the consistency of statements about inconsistency, just as it is to be able to judge the truth of statements about falsity. (For example, I think that you will agree that the fact that "2 + 2 = 5" is false does not make "Norm said '2 + 2 = 5'" false.)
To me, the nuanced distinction between truth and consistency comes in the facts that (1) the latter is weaker than the former ("Norm said '2 + 2 = 4'" and "Norm can do basic arithmetic" are consistent, even if they are not both true), and (2) that the latter is of interest mainly about collections of statements; the truth of a group of (non-mutually referential) statements is determined by the truth of each individual statement, but the same is not true for consistency.
All of the numbers here are correlations only.
No definition is given for what "consistency" means. Taxing cigarettes but not alcohol because of health is not, in my opinion, even remotely inconsistent.
Lastly, the article starts out asking a number of interesting questions and answers none of them, including the one in the title.
If you go digging for statistical confirmation of your biases, you will find it.
Motorcycles don't really have the same issue, as they generally do a lot less damage than a car since they weigh only a fraction as much. So helmet laws are more a question of personal choice and how much influence the state government wants to have over those decisions.
The argument mentioned by tghw is the only reason I agree with the law on this point. Considering law's meant to protect people from themselves (and only themselves) in general I'd pick freedom over mandatory safety any day.
At the very least, it does not apply to riders in the back seat very often.
Additionally, these issues aren't evaluated in isolation, there's lots of competing interests. Auto manufacturers and consumer interest groups have influence over seatbelt laws. For motorcycles there are ABATE groups in many states that tend to lobby against motorcycle helmet laws. How much influence these groups have may not necessarily be related to how safety conscious the state is in other areas.
Its easy to argue. Society spends 10's of thousands of dollars trying to rescue and heal those that don't wear seat belts.
Similarly, you could also argue than lack of sunscreen use leads to massive costs to society, so why not mandate that we all wear sunscreen at the beach and fine those who don't?
You also make it sound like people are only a cost to society. Lost taxes, scientific discoveries, families, etc., depending on their vocation. A lost parent can hurt a family, for example.
Never have I seen this justified in any plausible sense.
It's not that that value is incoherent or anything—it's actually not a bad idea in isolation—it's just that we seem to value self-determination strictly more.
Not to mention they can, and do, find all kinds of other ways to kill themselves, both accidentally and intentionally--and almost none of those are regulated in a similar fashion.
So... occupants of cars aren't mothers? Or fathers? Or run businesses? Or manage church bake sales? They aren't students with promising careers in medicine ahead of them? They aren't passionate lovers or mentors or good friends or musicians or even civil liberties lawyers?
When someone dies or is badly hurt, it doesn't affect just them. The author has a pretty disturbed view on human interaction to make this assertion in the first place. The argument that 'harm due to speed also hurt other people' and 'harm due to lack of seat belts only hurts the non-wearer' is specious.
Live Free or Die, motherfucker :-)
Or, as the evidence seems to show in this case, both.
> Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils.
Given that John Stark is the attributed author of the quote, I like to imagine that his sister might have added, "Valar morghulis".
It seems that the general consensus is the speed limit should be at the 85th percentile to minimize accidents. However, this just considers minimizing accidents, and I suppose I can see how we can lower the number of accidents but also increase the mortality rate.
Also, I suppose it's not completely fair to compare different states, as what works in one might not work in another and vice versa.
This really shouldn't be surprising: higher speed limits correlate with higher average speeds, and while energy goes as the square of the velocity, mitigation efforts do not.
No matter how well you engineer crumple zones, improve traction, give automated braking responses... if you are going fast enough when you actually hit something, it's the kinetic energy that is going to kill you.
Bear in mind that mortality rates and incident rates don't really reflect the same things here.
And, I'm not sure but wasn't there some accidents caused by people suddenly decelerating when they saw a police car? Or am I thinking of the rear-end collisions because of red lights.
Nobody ever sat down and rationally assessed the relative risk of motorcycles vs seat belts and crafted a law to take the two into account. Instead, what happened was at one point in time, a group of people lobbied and succeeded in changing one status quo and at another point in time, some other group of people lobbied and failed to change another status quo.
The actual title of the article is "Drive In A Red State? You’re More Likely To Die. Here’s Why" (and there is an earlier submission using that title [1]).
However, it appears that the submitter may be the author of the article.
Does the rule about not changing titles apply when it is the author of the article doing the submission?
In general, though, we're a bit more tolerant of title alterations when the author of the article is the one posting it, because the concerns around editorializing are less pressing.
Banning motorcycle riding outright is a much more invasive law than requiring a seat belt. Costs vs benefits.
In fact it probably will refuse to go anywhere unless you do.
I think the seatbelt laws are to get federal funding, while motorcycles have little political persuasion.
That being said - self-driving cars will likely allow manual overrides or require a driver in the case of a manual override for the same reason space shuttles have a cockpit and give astronauts the ability to manual override the controls. People will want the ability to have control just in case.
If a system fails, or says it is failing, and you feel you know it will work or have an alternative that might work. Having manual overrides as a fail safe for software failure can be life saving.
For example, what if your brake sensor malfunctions and your car ceases to be able to operate it's brakes? A manual pedal to brake the car could save your life. Although arguably redundant it will likely remain as part of the car until enough time has passed that such fears are considered completely unfounded.
"There hasn't been a brake sensor failure in over 25 years." Such a statement could probably convince people a manual override brake system isn't needed and they can save money by ditching it.
A flooded (but passable) road is an example that comes to mind--I don't envision us programming our way out of that one.
Surely there's dozens of similar examples.
Mothers.
Mothers of dead children have been a huge force is traffic policy in the US.
I also find it hard to believe author is not being disingenuous stating "repercussions of not wearing seat belts only affect the decision maker".
The last couple paragraphs are opinions stated as facts and very much want the reader to agree with them I can't help but feel the whole article/data was just a means for author to push his opinion.