[AnthonyMouse]

You're kind of making their point for them.

It's dumb to mandate helmets or any other specific technology because it removes the possibility for something better or for context-based decisionmaking.

Suppose you ride your motorcycle into the desert and then lose your helmet into a canyon. Your phone is dead. Your choices are a thirty hour walk out of the desert which might cause you to die of dehydration, or riding your motorcycle without a helmet. Should you get a ticket for making the obvious choice?

[HWR_14]

I'm not sure how you think I'm making their point for them. They said safety rules infringe on their freedom, and added an example of a more severe safety rule that would infringe on their freedom. I pointed out we also implemented a rule that does the thing they implied was more severe.

Meanwhile, there is a general necessity defense to violating all traffic laws for your motorcycle example. We don't list every possible emergency or every possible rule we would allow an exception to.

[AnthonyMouse]

> I'm not sure how you think I'm making their point for them.

They argued against mandating helmets in cars. Your point was that we could do something better than helmets and less inconvenient, namely airbags. But that is an argument for not mandating helmets. And the same argument generalizes to any specific technology. What happens when someone comes up with something better than an airbag but then it doesn't satisfy the rule "is an airbag" and is therefore prohibited?

> Meanwhile, there is a general necessity defense to violating all traffic laws for your motorcycle example.

In practice this kind of general exception either consumes the rule or isn't available when it legitimately applies. If you can say you lost your helmet and would have been stranded then everyone says this and you can't enforce the law. But if you can't claim that when it's true then the necessity defense isn't meaningful.

And for the same reason the exceptions are typically excessively narrow. Suppose you lose your helmet while camping, so you have plenty of food and water and can make the 3-day walk back to civilization. There is no risk of death. But then you have a three day walk for what would have been a two hour ride, which is going to make you late for work on Monday. Is not being late for work a necessity? And yet, is it reasonable to punish someone who makes that choice?

[ilyt]

Yes. Catering for extreme edge cases is a waste of time, just pay your ticket dumbass, how the fuck you even "lose" a helmet and why the fuck you didn't bring a phone charger?

Given the chance of the story being fabricated close to 100% catering for it is unreasonable.

[Shaanie]

You can make the exact same example, except someone without a driving license finds a car. I doubt you're opposed to mandating driver licenses, though.

[AnthonyMouse]

You're not making the point you think you are. All a driver license proves is that you took a basic class as a teenager and have been paying the government a fee since then. You could get the same benefit just by adding the class to the high school curriculum.

[defrost]

> You could get the same benefit just by adding the class to the high school curriculum.

This doesn't contribute to the upkeep of roads in the same manner as a yearly tax on those that use them.

So no, not the same benefit at all.

[AnthonyMouse]

You're thinking of car tax and fuel tax.

But also, the value of roads scales poorly with any of these things. The ability to have a package delivered to your front door is valuable regardless of whether or not you even have a car, and the value of it depends on what's in it rather than how much the truck cost. The most sensible way to fund any kind of basic infrastructure is from general revenues.

[ilyt]

The point is to discourage use of certain vehicles, not to fund anything.

But yes, truck used to haul building materials for a building site is the vehicle fulfilling its purpose and any replacement for that purpose being suboptimal.

Truck bought to haul 2 bags of groceries is not. Tax the second one.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Truck bought to haul 2 bags of groceries is not. Tax the second one.

How do you do this without taxing the first one?

If someone buys a truck to haul building materials to a building site, they are understandably not going to buy a separate vehicle just to haul 2 bags of groceries. But then how do you know what anybody is using it for the rest of the time? The list of legitimate purposes is unlimited. You're a homeowner who is into gardening and always bringing home mulch and saplings and renting landscaping equipment for projects. You're a retrocomputing enthusiast whose hobby requires you to be constantly transporting old mainframes. You're a parent who has to transport an entire junior varsity soccer team to practice every night.

How do you propose to distinguish any of these from someone who only buys a tank to carry home groceries?

[defrost]

Is it telepathy that allows you to claim that you know what I'm thinking?

I'm stating that a number of charges go towards the upkeep of roads and related services (at least in the country I'm present in) these charges include driver and vehicle licences, fuel taxes, etc.

> So the most sensible way to ..

Proposing an alternative doesn't negate the present practices, moreover it makes sense that as much of the public cost associated with roads should come from those that use the roads the most.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Is it telepathy that allows you to claim that you know what I'm thinking?

It's the fact that the driver license fee is paid at renewal, which isn't yearly in any US state for anyone under the age of 79. Moreover, the amount of the fee is such that it's essentially paying for the licensing bureaucracy, which you wouldn't need if you didn't have licensing.

> Proposing an alternative doesn't negate the present practices

Present practices have to be meritorious to justify preserving them.

> it makes sense that as much of the public cost associated with roads should come from those that use the roads the most.

But what does that mean?

If it's contribution to the cost of road maintenance then the cost should be paid almost entirely by a per-mile tax on large trucks, because road damage is proportional to axle weight to the fourth power and passenger vehicles are a rounding error.

If it's value of the roads then we're back to general revenues because the value is proportional to economic activity enabled by basic infrastructure which has no real relationship to number of miles traveled. One truckload of electronics is worth more than ten truckloads of scrap iron. One life-saving ride in an ambulance is worth more than a thousand days of commuting.