OP article is from 2021 and is news this week because the House recently voted(1) to reaffirm the mandate that automakers include equipment in all vehicles by 2026 to detect driver impairment and automatically disable vehicles when it is detected
If it's news, why isn't it in the news with a reasonable source? Most proposed regulation is OT-ish on HN and most proposed regulation takes a lot longer to turn into reality than originally scheduled.
One might leave the answer for why the only articles covering this regulation in mainstream sources are fact checking misinterpretations of the law (as opposed to a headline with what the law actually says) as a worthwhile exercise for the reader
This is terrible. All such systems will have false positives. It's wrong to treat everyone as a criminal instead of reserving such systems for people who actually have been convicted of it.
I'm sympathetic to this point of view, but then we have to be consistent with it.
No TSA. No license plate scanners. No fare gates for trains. No locks on doors. No anti-shoplifting tags.
EDIT: Is there some Emerson convention in town? You can look at my comments for some of his other quotes (It's actually not very surprising to me that an Anglo abolitionist who also believed that Anglos were the 'best' race wasn't a big fan of consistency!)
The difference is that you own your car, but not those other things. Things you own should always do what you want, not try to enforce laws against you.
Well it wouldn't preclude your use of the car (you can still enter it and turn it on), you just can't drive it on public roads (Essentially the entire use-case of moving a vehicle).
TSA is at the airport lobby and technically only precludes me from entering the airside of an airport, but its purpose is to prevent me from getting on a plane with a gun.
I don't think point of implementation is a strong argument here.
Wouldn’t an closer equivalent be DUI checkpoints staffed by government-accountable law enforcement officers at the entrance to the road? Not an automaker forced to privately police you in your own vehicle
Please don't do this here. You can make anyone look terrible by cherry-picking something garish, but it is not the curious conversation we want on HN. Moreover it gets trivially easier the further back in time you go.
First of all, that quote was pulled to insult me - it's specifically a quote about individuals' minds, not ideas. That is in fact the one of the strongest criticisms of Emerson - he grounded idea-based discourse in commentary on the people who hold those ideas. I'd even go so far as to say 'English Traits' is the perfect example of that failure.
Secondly, When a premise is supported only by a quote from an individual, it is completely acceptable to post a separate quote from that individual in response.
Why should I believe Emerson about consistency when (hopefully) all of us here disagree with him about Norsemen?
Maybe it would be flamebait if that was part of an argument, but his entire argument was "Emerson said this thing so it's true" and my argument was "Emerson also said this patently false thing."
I know it feels bad to look at the whole gorey corpus of otherwise really cool historical figures, but encouraging people to believe anything they say without critical analysis is the true anti-curiosity stance.
Thirdly, I agree it's easier to make people from the past look morally bad morally and that is precisely why we should not base our worldview on their quotes alone.
I think you took it too personally if you felt like it was specifically insulting you though. People regurgitate these things out of their own mental associations. It's not personal.
Yeah this is an anonymous forum (which inherently requires a false persona) so it literally can’t be personal.
BUT my point is that a common trope here is laundering bad behavior through quotes and revered historical figures - it’s something people often pick up when doing forensics in their youth.
I’m fine being told I’m small minded (we all are, significantly more than we’d like to believe), but it feels weird to have it happen on here without people supporting the argument. For example, “How far do you extend the demand for consistency RC_ITR - should we allow the government to install cameras on public land facing our homes? in that case they’re simply capturing photons that exist in public areas.”
That at least would have made me look foolish in a way that requires critical thinking.
Right! Right! Also, we can't require railings on stairs or prohibit electrical wiring from being attached to doorknobs as a trick, or stop people from driving on sidewalks.
Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds and this commenter exhibits the smallest of them all.
It also increases the cost of every new car. People complain about housing, and goods like cars being expensive. But many fail to realize that every do-good law has a cost.
"There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs."
Cities hate cars, and cities dominate the legislative process at the state and federal regulatory levels. Cars are a constant problem for cities, it makes sense that they'd rather spend their time and money on things other than fixing congestion and maintaining existing roads.
They can't attack cars directly, it would be political suicide, but they can boil the frog by making them increasingly expensive. That's what they're doing.
It can probably be pretty cheap, since it looks like it does not have to detect actual drunkenness. It just has to detect impaired driving. That might be mostly doable with hardware already being built into new cars.
It is already illegal to drive on public roads or third party property while intoxicated. Drunk driving interlocks which you have to blow in are pretty much the only way this could possibly be implemented. But https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/23/business/drunk-driving-in... "The Unforeseen Dangers of a Device That Curbs Drunken Driving".
I am doubtful that unless a car is fully autonomous anyway having the car try to pull itself over against driver input will be that much safer. I can see many iterations causing accidents by suddenly slowing down or merging into another vehicle or parking on blind corners. Plus I imagine the 'drunk' driver would then leave the immobile vehicle, opening a host of pedestrian on road risks
This is going to be so awesome when I can't drive my car because I just used hand sanitizer. Or won't let me drive because i just cleaned the windows with window cleaner.
So people who live in Minnesota just don't get to use cars for 4 months of the year? Autonomous vehicles cannot handle snow covered roads with emergently defined flocking based lanes and road edges. There's a reason the vast majority of autonomous vehicle testing is done in the arid southwest of the USA.
If you read the article, it speculates that the most likely mechanism will be IR cameras that detect distracted driving/sleep. This technology is already widely used in commercial truck driving.
I knew there was telescreens in every workplace and home in 1984, but Cameras in every vehicle observing the drivers action perpetually is something even Orwell couldn't come up with
I am really dreading the day my current car from 2015 that has no fancy tech features fails beyond repair and I have to get a new car. I will first attempt to get an older car with low mileage, but old cars won't last forever.
Depends how old. Older cars have better survivability than newer ones, almost exclusively due to the simplicity[0] of the design and parts. If you want a car that can last forever (with maintenance and from an odysseus ship perspective) then an old car with a diesel engine and manual transmission is the way to go.
Technically old cars can last forever if you simply keep repairing and replacing parts.
Got an engine with 200k miles on it? Swap it with a new one!
Obviously it’s not easy and can be very expensive (and many mechanics will look at you weird if asking them to do $20k of maintenance on a 20 year old car, but they won’t say no!)
I'm not opposed to having a car of Theseus, but I'm not particularly wealthy so like most people I would have to replace it once the cost of maintenance exceeds the cost of monthly payments on something newer.
I think this is a horrible idea, and I really hope someone like EFF files a lawsuit against it. If the government can simply turn off your car whenever it feels like it, what else could they turn off that they don't want you to use? How about an off switch for your bank account for "unsafe" purchases? Turn off your internet for speech the government wishes to censor?
Could the system that disables a vehicle when impairment is detected also be triggered remotely in vehicles that are always "connected"? If so, under what circumstances could this take place?
It would be much better, and more effective, to have police everywhere so you could ask their permission. Or, this would work, prohibit cars so nobody would ever die.
The laws are already in place to convince (most) people against impaired driving. The threat of losing your license and being fined is already there. Increase the punishment along with naming and shaming the criminals publicly. Imprison second time offenders as they clearly have a drinking or substance problem that needs treatment and they can't be trusted to operate motor vehicles.
This is just a slow creep towards total governmental and manufacturer control of vehicles under the guise of ~safety~. I hope I can still buy offline vehicles for a bargain well into my life but with society and the law pushing people towards electric vehicles, I feel like that window is slowly closing because electric vehicles are even more guilty of this.
I hope the government will force these companies to release the algorithms used to determine whether someone is driving impaired so the public and other auto companies can work together to improve reliability of systems and also help up-and-coming automakers to implement these systems without another expensive barrier to entry to get past.
But they won't - and we'll be stuck with sub-par programming that doesn't account for edge cases, dirty sensors, broken cameras, electrical problems, and requiring expensive first-party repairs at your "authorized (st)ealership" whenever a part of the system has a slight problem.
Owning things is getting more and more expensive - no need to tack on more governmentally forced features that would really only prevent the die-hard drinkers and drug users from driving when they should be locked up in the first place.
Can't wait for the inevitable cases of people in extremis trying to drive themselves to a hospital from far out in the country dying on the roadside because their car decided that their driving was erratic or their behavior inside the car was unusual.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] thread(1)https://thefederalist.com/2023/11/08/house-republicans-help-...
No TSA. No license plate scanners. No fare gates for trains. No locks on doors. No anti-shoplifting tags.
EDIT: Is there some Emerson convention in town? You can look at my comments for some of his other quotes (It's actually not very surprising to me that an Anglo abolitionist who also believed that Anglos were the 'best' race wasn't a big fan of consistency!)
TSA is at the airport lobby and technically only precludes me from entering the airside of an airport, but its purpose is to prevent me from getting on a plane with a gun.
I don't think point of implementation is a strong argument here.
Consistency is not a primary value. It's important, but it shouldn't be the only driver to do something.
Please don't do this here. You can make anyone look terrible by cherry-picking something garish, but it is not the curious conversation we want on HN. Moreover it gets trivially easier the further back in time you go.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
First of all, that quote was pulled to insult me - it's specifically a quote about individuals' minds, not ideas. That is in fact the one of the strongest criticisms of Emerson - he grounded idea-based discourse in commentary on the people who hold those ideas. I'd even go so far as to say 'English Traits' is the perfect example of that failure.
Secondly, When a premise is supported only by a quote from an individual, it is completely acceptable to post a separate quote from that individual in response.
Why should I believe Emerson about consistency when (hopefully) all of us here disagree with him about Norsemen?
Maybe it would be flamebait if that was part of an argument, but his entire argument was "Emerson said this thing so it's true" and my argument was "Emerson also said this patently false thing."
I know it feels bad to look at the whole gorey corpus of otherwise really cool historical figures, but encouraging people to believe anything they say without critical analysis is the true anti-curiosity stance.
Thirdly, I agree it's easier to make people from the past look morally bad morally and that is precisely why we should not base our worldview on their quotes alone.
I think you took it too personally if you felt like it was specifically insulting you though. People regurgitate these things out of their own mental associations. It's not personal.
BUT my point is that a common trope here is laundering bad behavior through quotes and revered historical figures - it’s something people often pick up when doing forensics in their youth.
I’m fine being told I’m small minded (we all are, significantly more than we’d like to believe), but it feels weird to have it happen on here without people supporting the argument. For example, “How far do you extend the demand for consistency RC_ITR - should we allow the government to install cameras on public land facing our homes? in that case they’re simply capturing photons that exist in public areas.”
That at least would have made me look foolish in a way that requires critical thinking.
Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds and this commenter exhibits the smallest of them all.
Yes.
> No license plate scanners.
Yes.
> No fare gates for trains.
Sure. A lot of places will do the fare check on the train.
> No locks on doors.
Well, no mandated locks. I hope I'm able to leave my front door unlocked if I choose. It's my door.
> No anti-shoplifting tags.
Ok. Again, I don't see why these should be required by law.
And mine:
> No compliance surveillance built into my possessions.
Yes.
"There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs."
They can't attack cars directly, it would be political suicide, but they can boil the frog by making them increasingly expensive. That's what they're doing.
a) off topic b) low quality c) true
It can probably be pretty cheap, since it looks like it does not have to detect actual drunkenness. It just has to detect impaired driving. That might be mostly doable with hardware already being built into new cars.
Solution is cars that drive themselves.
The Cubans would like a word
Depends how old. Older cars have better survivability than newer ones, almost exclusively due to the simplicity[0] of the design and parts. If you want a car that can last forever (with maintenance and from an odysseus ship perspective) then an old car with a diesel engine and manual transmission is the way to go.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxSNT1bmEQY&t=75s
Got an engine with 200k miles on it? Swap it with a new one!
Obviously it’s not easy and can be very expensive (and many mechanics will look at you weird if asking them to do $20k of maintenance on a 20 year old car, but they won’t say no!)
Stupidest law ever.
This is just a slow creep towards total governmental and manufacturer control of vehicles under the guise of ~safety~. I hope I can still buy offline vehicles for a bargain well into my life but with society and the law pushing people towards electric vehicles, I feel like that window is slowly closing because electric vehicles are even more guilty of this.
I hope the government will force these companies to release the algorithms used to determine whether someone is driving impaired so the public and other auto companies can work together to improve reliability of systems and also help up-and-coming automakers to implement these systems without another expensive barrier to entry to get past.
But they won't - and we'll be stuck with sub-par programming that doesn't account for edge cases, dirty sensors, broken cameras, electrical problems, and requiring expensive first-party repairs at your "authorized (st)ealership" whenever a part of the system has a slight problem.
Owning things is getting more and more expensive - no need to tack on more governmentally forced features that would really only prevent the die-hard drinkers and drug users from driving when they should be locked up in the first place.