I know it’s somewhat unpopular because of many things are labeled with insignificant quantities or are treated as a fact of life, but Prop 65 has to be my favorite ballot proposition.
I would rather know what potentially harmful substances are in something and decide if it’s acceptable than not be told at all.
Prop 65 threshold for level of harm is two orders of magnitude below any effect level (not the harm level, effect) which I’d argue creates so many false notices of harm that most people simply ignore them eroding trust in the government.
Indeed the level is so low that under the law, the daily recommended dose of vitamin A for pregnant women would need a notice saying it caused birth defects. They had to ignore the law and add a caveat for vitamin A since not taking it causes birth defects.
If they didn’t pick an arbitrary threshold, ignoring scientific consensus on what dose makes the poison, it would have been far more successful.
It might be your preference but prop 65 warnings have basically taught an entire generation that safety warnings are meaningless and can be ignored, which is presumably the opposite of the desired effect.
It includes everything from Aspirin, Aloe Vera leaf extract, Oral contraceptives and estrogens, Alcoholic beverages, Leather dust, Chinese style salted fish, to Benzene, Bracken Fern, and hexavalent chromium.
I loved how basically every apt I went in in SF had a "This apt may contain chemicals that may be known to cause cancer by the state of California. At the entrance.
Anecdotal of course, but even when I accidentally ran over a squirrel I _immediately_ noticed. Running a _person_ over and _dragging them_... well I think I would realize.
Obviously this is some serious arm-chair speculation so take it with a grain of salt.
I simply can't read messages and type with my fingers if I wanted to, while moving. Do people really do that without immediately crashing?
Or is using Google Maps with Android Auto and tapping to view incoming texts what should be a felony?
If looking away from the road is the problem, then we should prohibit any controls in the center console for climate control or radios, and...passengers?
There are plenty of people that absolutely do exactly that.
When I was younger and dumber I used to do literally that. Get a text message, read it, and respond to it, while driving. With a stick shift, too. I can't believe I never hurt anyone doing this.
In BC, Canada, where I now live, this is prosecuted rather aggressively as 'distracted driving'. First ticket is in the neighborhood of $400 + required increase in premiums, and the threshold is touching your phone or having it within reach and not in a cradle. A second offense within a year can lead to a suspended license. It certainly shows. When I go down to the states, it is noticeable how many people I can see interacting with their phones compared to BC.
I can easily believe you never hurt anyone doing this, as conditions that lead to an accident are rare and often predictable. For example, you probably never answered a text while going through a roundabout, but restricted it to straight sections of road with a clear view ahead and no nearby cars. This increased you risk, but from an extremely small base.
There are people driving on the road that are periodically looking down at their phone to text. For x seconds at a time. It boggles my mind whenever I see it. Kind of makes me want to chuck something at them.
I'm sure everyone has been in a situation where they are not paying attention. But I think the danger with texting is that it happens more often. It is unlikely to be just one message. Which makes it more likely to result in an accident.
These are being rolled out across Australia. I believe they use computer vision to filter down the data and then pass it on to a human for manual verification. The proof is then a photo of you with a phone in hand.
>Texting and driving ought to be treated similarly to a felony DUI.
And that's how we have a police state. Honestly, emotions and laws really don't mix, that's how we have more people incarcerated both per capita and in total numbers than any other country in the world.
"Super-predators," gets votes, but the repercussions were pretty horrible.
Something much less horrible would be to make gasoline super expensive like in Europe, or lower the speed limit to a speed that is much less likely to cause fatalities, or do an old fashioned marketing / awareness push. The More You Know.
Also, the article seems to be speculating on the cause:
>How many of those deaths involved distracted driving?
>“It’s much bigger than the data show,” said Bruce Landsberg, vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. Data collection methods are so riddled with problems, he said, that reliable estimates are difficult if not impossible.
So it's bigger than the data shows, but reliable estimates are difficult or impossible, so it seems he's talking out his ass.
Maybe it's because many more people were working at home in 2021-2022.
Studies have shown that texting while driving is about a high a risk factor as drinking alcohol. If not classed as a felony (and intrinsically more difficult to control) - the state should at least do something to seriously discourage people from doing it.
When you drive after using alcohol, you are drunk the entire trip. When you text and drive, you are distracted for five seconds. This is scientists seeking headlines, not a rational risk assessment.
You can tell from accident statistics that risk has not actually gone up as much as if every driver had started drinking alcohol in 2008.
When you drive after using alcohol, you are drunk the entire trip. When you text and drive, you are distracted for five seconds.
Apples and oranges.
When you are drunk, you might be 20 percent or more impaired - continuously. Sufficient to cause an accident.
When you text - you are 100 percent impaired for 20 or more seconds. Sufficient to cause an accident.
Reducing your comparison to just one dimension ("duration") while completely ignoring the other ("severity") is just - silly.
Also, your estimate of 5 seconds total duration for texting is plainly unrealistic. It takes 5 seconds just to find the chat bubble (assuming your phone hasn't gone into sleep mode) and adjust your cognitive focus.
But this whole exchange is silly, so I'll stop there.
It's plainly obvious that texting causes considerable impairment, not just for driving, but for walking, or just standing there oblivious to everything happening around you ... for just about everything, actually.
I think making texting and driving a felony is an absurd emotional overreaction and would cause more harm than good. I think we have many laws on the books that are absurd emotional overreactions that put a lot of non-criminals in the system, and frankly, it disgusts me.
I think people who are proponents of that either aren't very thoughtful, or are just outright cruel, or perhaps both.
> And that's how we have a police state. Honestly, emotions and laws really don't mix, that's how we have more people incarcerated both per capita and in total numbers than any other country in the world.
But… traffic laws isn’t how you got there. Most of the rest of the developed world has stricter traffic laws, lower rates of car accident fatalities, and much lower incarceration rates.
Can’t mobOSes disable all functionality on movement above X/mph —perhaps allow it only if another device is in proximity (such as passenger presence, in public transit, etc), except for hands-free voice calls?
imo there's already a bunch of inconsistent nanny-state stuff when trying to use a smartphone as a passenger/navigator. There's things I'm not allowed to do without unplugging the phone briefly, and there's also things I'm allowed to do that absolutely require looking down at a zero-haptic-feedback touchscreen.
It seems like there's always corner cases that aren't considered (in your proposal above, what if the navigator doesn't have a phone because they're a child, or because their phone ran out of batteries? What happens when the sensors/algorithms are wrong about how fast we're going? What happens when the sensors are wrong about whether or not there's another device? What if that second device keeps disappearing and re-apparing while somebody tries to do a multiple step operation?) ... Trying to build some water-tight mechanism to keep us out of trouble but also with access to full functionality "when we can use it responsibly" is an endless rabbit hole.
IMO it feels like a systemic problem asking for a systemic solution. Whether we think that solution is self-driving cars, rail travel, walkable cities, or taxis probably says as much about our politics as anything else though.
I think the failsafe is to not allow anything beside voice calls if it detects movement. Phones while on motion are a convenience, not a need. Before the 90s very few people had mobile phones and they got places fine.
That is absolutely false. I didn't even own a car in the 2000s because going anywhere meant a bunch of printed maps, bad GPS, and getting lost. Google Maps liberated me to a whole world of restaurants, side trips, urgent plan changes, and last-minute tourism. Plus podcasts, voice memos, and time sensitive texts. It kills me that safetyism is throwing out all those babies with the bathwater.
That’s on you. Like almost everyone over the age of 50, I learnt to drive before mobile phones and GPS, and it was fine. Paper maps and street directories worked well enough. Getting lost was uncommon, and no big deal.
+1 for Schwab. An ATM in a foreign country ate my debit card. One call, which was connected to a real human in less than a minute, and they overnighted a new card to my hotel.
All the iDevices (including laptops since at least T1) use the same NAND packages. Pre-iPhone 8 / T2 devices use a BGA60 package, while NANDs in devices after that use a BGA110 package.
For example, the NAND chip found in the iFixit teardown of the 2019 16 inch (TSB4227) is explicitly listed as supported by the programmer linked above: https://i.imgur.com/06a0KEg.jpg
I've been using this on/off since early 2019. Much better than stock honda LKAS / cruise control in terms of detecting lanes, lower speeds, etc.
The driver monitoring has gotten a lot better as well. If you are inattentive (based on your gaze) and don't respond the the prompts quickly, it plays a loud alarm and disables the system (until the car restarts) to prevent something like the videos of people sleeping in Teslas you see online.
I would rather know what potentially harmful substances are in something and decide if it’s acceptable than not be told at all.
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