Bad drivers are already a part of the risk calculation.
I think the desire to track them individually is a manifestation of our North American propensity to look for punitive solutions.
And I would almost guarantee that someone made money off of establishing a contract to sell such tracking devices to the state, to then sell/force them on bad drivers.
Profit > Punishment
Private insurance companies buy these, not the state
> to then sell/force them on bad drivers.
They don't need to be forced. Those drivers could be offered the option of installing them with a smaller increase in premium, and not installing them with a much higher increase in premium. Eventually, if their driving habits don't change for the better, they will be priced out of auto insurance, which is what happens today if you continually are at fault in car accidents.
At a certain point, that's the same as being forced.
At a certain point, the risk you impose on the insurance pool by not driving safely is greater than your ability to pay for that risk, so you have forced (priced) yourself out of insurance coverage.
You can always go with another insurance company who will offer you terms that don't involve the tracking device, but they aren't going to extend that coverage to you for a lower price.
But not everyone can be a safe driver, which is one reason we need alternative transportation options for them.
That's a weasel statement. "bad" "part" "calculation" are all soft terms. You can always tighten the metrics, which a GPS would allow for, given time and rigor.
But I do believe that we have a bias towards solutions that punish a particular person.[1]
It's an insurance company, if many people drive badly then you can be sure they've factored it in because they don't lose money over a solved problem like that.
I still don't think we should target bad drivers for extra surveillance, because I value the privacy of the bad drivers too much.
Also valuing the privacy of the bad drivers, is just valuing my own privacy down the road. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
[2] At first they came for the bad drivers, but I wasn't a bad driver ...
Yeah, that's why trucks and buses beep all over the world.
Thanks for the noise, insurance industry!
How are you getting 'genocide' from the above comment?
> [2] At first they came for the bad drivers, but I wasn't a bad driver ...
This is an allusion to "First they came... ", a poem written by a German Lutheran minister recalling the cowardice of contemporary German intellectuals who would not oppose the Holocaust:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
You should be careful using allusions when you don't understand their origins.
Even if I tried, there is literally no way I could possibly self censor myself enough to avoid offending everyone on the internet.
These types, of threads based on offense are a waste of time:
1) If the person claims to be offended, you can't refute that because the offense is an internal state that they claim they are experiencing.
2) If the claim is that someone else maybe offended, then you also can't argue against that because now you are debating on an inference for which there is no firm evidence.
It's like those endgames in chess where you wish you didn't have to move.
Even by responding to this, I lose, because I will be likely down-voted for not being sensitive enough, even when no offense was ever intended.
However I can flip it on you. Go and find proof that I intended to offend with my comment.
Try not to be offended by constructive feedback, and now that you know, perhaps think twice before you use that allusion in the future. I've also made similar well-intended mistakes, and I've benefited from others helping me learn and grow from them.
> You should be careful
You're doing some serious backflips there. As if he isn't being careful enough for your taste. That's just useless drivel.
Read the thread again: Once it was clear that they were legitimately unaware of the origin of the allusion they made, the suggestion I made was to be careful in general using such allusions.
An alternative would be to only require tracking for drivers who have proven themselves to be unsafe (found to be repeatedly at fault in accidents). Car insurance is not just protection against accidents due to traffic and weather, it's also protection against negligent behavior of drivers themselves.
In the longer term, though, we need to switch to other forms of transportation that don't require individuals to self insure. Perhaps that will be self driving car and bus services, that don't have the huge risks associated with people driving, or maybe they will involve expanded rail service.