[missosoup]

> The moment you begin endangering other people's lives is the same moment that backgrounds, poorly-disadvantaged or not, become meaningless.

Spoken life someone who never had to decide between rolling the 0.000001% chance dice on driving to work tired, and their kids going hungry or potentially getting taken away if they lose their job. People do what they need to do to survive and take care of their loved ones. People will absolutely risk their lives and those of others in order to protect their kids at all cost, even when facing much worse odds. That's a constant in life. No amount of moral posturing will change that. I'm not saying their actions are 'right', just saying they're an inevitable outcome of the society we have built.

Efficiently demonstrating my point - some people on HN live in a bubble of privilege and have no idea what real life is like for the vast majority of the population.

I'm just curious, with all the moral posturing - realistically, what would you suggest that people do when after a long shift at a blue collar job they realize they might be too tired to safely drive home. Do they sleep at their workplace? How does that transition into them needing to be back at work, showered, dressed, etc. by 9am the next morning? What are the actual logistics of this concept here?

And how do you reconcile all this moral posturing and the impact of banning drivers who experience this (up to 50% of the entire population of developed nations by some polling) vs. the fact that we now have a pretty cheap car technology that turns that 0.000001% dice roll into a 1e-20 one.

[pessimizer]

What if the person you kill is also a human being with a family and problems? Should they get a say in what you think is an acceptable risk?

Or should we just treat everybody we don't know as obviously spoiled people who live in a bubble of privilege, have nothing to lose, have never missed a meal, love no one and have no one who depends on them, and only have an opinion on what you do in order to feel superior to you and to humiliate you?

[missosoup]

It's not quite a direct comparison, but in law there is a 'heat of passion' defence which affords leniency for crimes committed when e.g. a parent walks in on their child being harmed and murders the assailant.

The reason this defence (and a line of other similar) exist is because as society we have accepted the fact that people will act in self interest, self protection, and above all protection of their children. No amount of education or indoctrination overrides that. (Fun fact, in some countries, escaping from jail is not illegal/punishable - assuming you don't commit other crimes in the act. Because, once again, we as society recognise that it's human nature to seek freedom and it cannot be overriden, therefore punishing it achieves nothing.

Ultimately it doesn't matter if you think a parent driving to work tired is acceptable or not, because we already know that they absolutely will. The only question is how do you mitigate the damage of driving to work tired, and whether your mitigation strategy is a net benefit or net loss to society.

'Make it compulsory for cars to detect sleeping/unconscious/seizing/microsleeping driver and pull over' is an infinitely better strategy in every regard imaginable compared to 'ban up to 50% of the population from driving'. And note that only one of those 4 situations would be avoidable with a ban, the other 3 can strike at any time with no warning or history.