On one hand, I agree with you in the general sense

On the other, I think at this point both sides of the specific "should dogs be restrained in cars" wars are pretty sizeable.

Some people feel like it's the nanny state encroaching on their rights, others understand how a 20 mph crash could grievously injure our dogs, and that taking 30 seconds* to secure them can be a huge difference.

* some people paint it as a huge hassle, but my 75 lb Greyhound is as nervous and training-resistant as dogs get and had no problem learning being still enough to slip into his harness before we get moving

Your car should not be responsible for enforcing the law.

That’s the point.

It's enforcing the law it's preventing tangible harm from occurring. There are people that disliked seatbelts and their restrictions at first too.

Taken to its ultimate conclusion we’ll end up living in pods like Wall-E. God forbid people experience danger or risk in any aspect of their lives.

"Turn off the radio when someone is unbuckled" is not an excessive or unusual precaution. Don't be so dramatic and hysterical.

It's very unusual!

Deactivating the radio does not prevent harm. Rather, it’s a penalty. But, if you enjoy being punished by an inanimate object, knock yourself out. For all I know, you find it erotic to be bossed around by ‘your’ vehicle. Whatever gets you off. More power to you. I’m sure there is a market for folks who would enjoy having electric nipple clamps shock them when they forget to use their turn signal. To each their own.

What tangible harm did turning off the radio prevent in OP's case?

I'm not passing judgement on the radio turning off, I'm just saying: calling out leaving a dog unrestrained as "pretty reckless" isn't that off base.

Some people will browbeat you over topics that they personally don't care that much about, just so they can feel good about themselves: I agree with that. But I think people tend to really do feel pretty strongly about the unrestrained dog thing.

At the end of the day it's your life, your dog, we all take risks, etc. etc. but it's still an uneasy thing to think about how it can go wrong

I dunno. Where I grew up, it was commonplace for kids to ride in the bed of a pickup truck, with or without a topper - my best friend and I rode with his dad that way on a six-hour road trip to the next state over, and on the six-hour trip back. Absent a genuine miracle, any collision at highway speeds would've killed the both of us outright. But no one involved thought anything of it, because that was just what you did.

I'm sympathetic to the distaste for scolds robotic and otherwise, but on the other hand, sometimes the scolds are right.

I think the key is that when you're designing a scold, you should ask whether a user circumventing the scold is going to be more dangerous than an unscolded user.

I'm reminded of a prior employer who didn't want us doing nontrivial networking at our desks, so they used STP traffic as a sort of canary. If you plugged in a switch that was smart enough to be running STP, your port would be disabled for 30 minutes.

So of course, we puzzled it out with wireshark, disabled STP, and created a monster by running network cables over the cube partitions. Sometime later we accidentally brought the network to its knees with the fallout of a switching loop (which is what STP prevents).

As a policy, it was like if you needed to pass a breathalyzer in order to put on your seatbelt.

At first I thought you were referring to shielded twisted pair cables for Ethernet, then I realized you were talking about the spanning tree protocol for switches.

The point is not that [bad thing] isn't bad. It's that scolding is the wrong way to go about it. How would your friend's dad have reacted to a stranger at the gas station yelling at him about the kids in the bed?

A better approach is friendliness, and gently pointing out how dangerous it is. "Hey man - careful with those kids. My neighbor died that way growing up - might be worth pulling them into the cab" is more likely to get a "Really? Dang, yea, you're right"

Spoken like a man who never met Douglas Haynes, but I take your point nonetheless.

It's not just about protecting the dog, but also about protecting people from flying dogs. That said, it's not realistic to require that dogs be restrained in motor vehicles.