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by fragmede 172 days ago
"Move fast and break things" is a Facebook slogan. Applying it to Google or Waymo just doesn’t fit. If anything, Waymo is moving too slow. 100 people are going to die in seven days from drunk drivers and New Years in the US.

How's that for a real world trolley problem?
1 comments
shafyy 172 days ago
The most effective way of decreasing traffic deaths is safer driving laws, as the recent example of Helsinki has shown. That and better public transportation infrastructure. If you think that a giant, private, for-profit company cares about people's lives, you are in for a ride.
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arcfour 172 days ago
> The most effective way of decreasing traffic deaths is safer driving laws

This is almost hilariously false. "Oh yeah, those words on paper? Well, they actually physically stopped me from running the red light and plowing into 4 pedestrians!"

> If you think that a giant, private, for-profit company cares about people's lives, you are in for a ride.

I honestly wonder how leftists manage to delude themselves so heavily? I'm sure a bunch of politicians really have my best interests at heart. Lol

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shafyy 167 days ago
> This is almost hilariously false. "Oh yeah, those words on paper? Well, they actually physically stopped me from running the red light and plowing into 4 pedestrians!"

It's very clearly proven that hitting a pedestrian with 50 km/h is exponentially more dangerous than hitting them with 30 km/h. It's very clearly proven that having physically separted bike lines prevents deaths. It's very clearly proven that other measure like speed bumps, one-way streets, smart traffic routing prevents deaths.

And I am not even going to respond to your idiotic "leftist" statement.

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arcfour 166 days ago
It's very clearly proven that murder is dangerous, yet people still commit it. You still have not explained how laws stop things from happening, as if by magic.

> And I am not even going to respond to your idiotic "leftist" statement.

This says more about you than it does me. Taking the most cynical view possible, at least a for profit company has a profit motive to keep me alive unlike a bureaucrat. A bureaucrat doesn't lose their salary if traffic deaths go up. In fact, if a problem gets worse, they often receive more funding to fix it. If a government road is dangerous, you cannot easily fire the government and switch to a competitor's road.

The success you mentioned in Helsinki wasn't a triumph of law; it was a triumph of engineering. The question is not whether we want safety, but which system—a state monopoly with no financial penalty for failure, or a private entity that faces financial ruin if it kills its customers—is more likely to engender it.

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