It also increases the cost of every new car. People complain about housing, and goods like cars being expensive. But many fail to realize that every do-good law has a cost.

"There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs."

Cities hate cars, and cities dominate the legislative process at the state and federal regulatory levels. Cars are a constant problem for cities, it makes sense that they'd rather spend their time and money on things other than fixing congestion and maintaining existing roads.

They can't attack cars directly, it would be political suicide, but they can boil the frog by making them increasingly expensive. That's what they're doing.

I wonder if this is being downvoted because it's

a) off topic b) low quality c) true

> It also increases the cost of every new car.

It can probably be pretty cheap, since it looks like it does not have to detect actual drunkenness. It just has to detect impaired driving. That might be mostly doable with hardware already being built into new cars.

I'm sympathetic to this point of view, but then we have to be consistent with it.

No TSA. No license plate scanners. No fare gates for trains. No locks on doors. No anti-shoplifting tags.

The difference is that you own your car, but not those other things. Things you own should always do what you want, not try to enforce laws against you.

I was under the impression that 99.9% of people take their cars out on publicly owned roads when they drive. Am I mistaken?

But this would go in the cars, not in the roads, so that's irrelevant.

And the TSA rules apply to my suitcase, not to the plane. What's the difference?

Your suitcase isn't required to have a built-in X-ray machine.

Well it wouldn't preclude your use of the car (you can still enter it and turn it on), you just can't drive it on public roads (Essentially the entire use-case of moving a vehicle).

TSA is at the airport lobby and technically only precludes me from entering the airside of an airport, but its purpose is to prevent me from getting on a plane with a gun.

I don't think point of implementation is a strong argument here.

Wouldn’t an closer equivalent be DUI checkpoints staffed by government-accountable law enforcement officers at the entrance to the road? Not an automaker forced to privately police you in your own vehicle

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds - Emerson

Consistency is not a primary value. It's important, but it shouldn't be the only driver to do something.

These Norsemen are excellent persons in the main, with good sense, steadiness, wise speech, and prompt action. But they have a singular turn for homicide; their chief end of man is to murder or to be murdered - Emerson

Are you trying to discredit Emerson by suggesting he is a racist? I read the source(1) and it seems he is arguing strongly against racial determination

(1)https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/emerson/4957107.0005.001/1:6.4?...

You read a book called 'English Traits' where Emerson tries to grapple with the reasons why British people are the best in the world and you got an anti-racism message from it?

He’s not a ethnic denialist but seems to paint a multifaceted picture of nature + nurture, the influence of genetics, trade, culture, religion, geography and much more, placed in the context of a conversation where racialism is the dominant model among his contemporaries

Please don't do this here. You can make anyone look terrible by cherry-picking something garish like this, but it is not the curious conversation we want on HN. Moreover it gets trivially easier the further back in time you go.

"Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine."

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I wholeheartedly disagree.

First of all, that quote was pulled to insult me - it's specifically a quote about individuals' minds, not ideas. That is in fact the one of the strongest criticisms of Emerson - he grounded idea-based discourse in commentary on the people who hold those ideas. I'd even go so far as to say 'English Traits' is the perfect example of that failure.

Secondly, When a premise is supported only by a quote from an individual, it is completely acceptable to post a separate quote from that individual in response.

Why should I believe Emerson about consistency when (hopefully) all of us here disagree with him about Norsemen?

Maybe it would be flamebait if that was part of an argument, but his entire argument was "Emerson said this thing so it's true" and my argument was "Emerson also said this patently false thing."

I know it feels bad to look at the whole gorey corpus of otherwise really cool historical figures, but encouraging people to believe anything they say without critical analysis is the true anti-curiosity stance.

Thirdly, I agree it's easier to make people from the past look morally bad morally and that is precisely why we should not base our worldview on their quotes alone.

I agree with you that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38222537 invoked Emerson as a cliché, which was neither interesting nor helpful.

I think you took it too personally if you felt like it was specifically insulting you though. People regurgitate these things out of their own mental associations. It's not personal.

Yeah this is an anonymous forum (which inherently requires a false persona) so it literally can’t be personal.

BUT my point is that a common trope here is laundering bad behavior through quotes and revered historical figures - it’s something people often pick up when doing forensics in their youth.

I’m fine being told I’m small minded (we all are, significantly more than we’d like to believe), but it feels weird to have it happen on here without people supporting the argument. For example, “How far do you extend the demand for consistency RC_ITR - should we allow the government to install cameras on public land facing our homes? in that case they’re simply capturing photons that exist in public areas.”

That at least would have made me look foolish in a way that requires critical thinking.

Right! Right! Also, we can't require railings on stairs or prohibit electrical wiring from being attached to doorknobs as a trick, or stop people from driving on sidewalks.

Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds and this commenter exhibits the smallest of them all.

We already have the third amendment.

> No TSA.

Yes.

> No license plate scanners.

Yes.

> No fare gates for trains.

Sure. A lot of places will do the fare check on the train.

> No locks on doors.

Well, no mandated locks. I hope I'm able to leave my front door unlocked if I choose. It's my door.

> No anti-shoplifting tags.

Ok. Again, I don't see why these should be required by law.

And mine:

> No compliance surveillance built into my possessions.

Yes.