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I have a quick question before I rip your comment to shreds: are you intentionally misinterpreting me, or are your reading comprehension skills just super, super bad? Because I read your entire comment and it’s abundantly clear that you missed the point completely. Like, you’re not even close. If English isn’t your first language, that would probably explain it; is it?
I do see how insane that sounds. Stuff usually sounds pretty insane when you jump to conclusions and make shit up. For example:
Clearly you don’t like it when old people get their keys taken away. After all, when you retest driving aptitude more frequently and catch more unsafe drivers, it’s exactly like when we were testing for COVID too frequently and finding more cases, just like President Trump said. Really all you’re doing is viciously and violently trampling on the elderly individual’s God-given right to drive their car—possibly through a farmer’s market—for the lame-ass reason of “protecting public safety” or some liberal bullshit like that. Just like how the deaths of the immune-compromised and elderly were a necessary sacrifice, collateral damage to ensure I had the FREEDOM to go see Transformers 14 in theaters in 2020. Fucking with the rights of the individual to protect public safety? What’s next? Telling people they can’t go up in Target without a vaccine card or at least a mask on their face—a muzzle, really—or even worse, telling me I’m not allowed to take a dump on the sidewalk? Those fucking Commies. Thanks for agreeing with me on this, we’re anti-vax bros for life!
Do you see how insane that sounds?
This is why we don’t jump to conclusions. I never said that the “olds should count for less than anyone else”. Wanna know what I did? I spent the pandemic yelling at people to be safe and unselfish so that my immune-compromised spouse doesn’t die, and listening to them scream at me that her death is a price they’re willing to pay. I lost my job over it. At no point did I put words in their mouths or deliberately misinterpret their words in order to try to “gotcha” them on a forum, those monkeyshines were beneath me.
Consider the following:
I don’t have a solution, but saying as soon as you retire (turn 65) you should be locked in a house and out of cars because now you’re dangerous is wrong too.
I agree, which is why I didn’t say it, or imply it, or even leave that open to interpretation. I write carefully. If you got at least Bs and Cs in the Language Arts classes where they taught context and context clues, you are well-equipped to read what I write, reading it as it’s written, and taking it at face value. To put it more directly: the right interpretation for what I say is the one I’m writing for you.
Now that we have that straightened out, here’s the spoon-feeding version of my point, just like how you feed the people you apparently believe are cool to drive 15-foot Buicks at highway speeds (hope you don’t mind my jumping to conclusions again, you did it like 20 times).
When people can’t drive safely, we don’t let ‘em. Because it’s not safe. When people age, their eyesight goes. They can’t react as fast. They can’t brake hard enough, or in time. They can’t check their blind spot because they can’t turn their head. Not all of them, but many. Which is why I propose we at least just take that test we use, with the eye chart down at the DMV, and make it so that you have to do that more often when you get older. Once you hit your 60s or 70s, every year. People who are still capable of driving safely would be allowed to. People who can no longer safely drive wouldn’t be allowed to. Is that such a bad thing? Is it prejudicial to deprive those who cannot drive safely of the privilege of unsafe driving? In the interest of public safety, you have to infringe on individuals’ liberty at times, because your rights end where another person’s rights begin. That’s why we have compulsory vaccination to attend school, that’s why we don’t let people with untreated epilepsy fly airliners, and it’s why we make people take a test to make sure they can see with their eyeballs before we issue or renew their drivers’ license. There is one alternative: knowingly allowing people to stay on the road whom we know wouldn’t be if we checked to make sure it was safe. And that’s it. There’s no other way around it.
I meant it when I said I feel bad for them. I have empathy, I’m not a monster. I hate it, it sucks, but objectively it’s better to make sure unsafe drivers are off the road than to inflict false mercy.
It just looks like a bloated and slower version of Geometric Weather
I actually did read the “fucking article”, and others besides. Also, if you’re going to be condescending to people on Lemmy, at least stop talking like you’re narrating the next 2am chili. It is the judgment of this court (me) that you have posted cringe.
Anyway:
https://siegfriedandjensen.com/passing-the-test/
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813266
https://www.iihs.org/topics/older-drivers/license-renewal-laws-table
Example 1, New Mexico:
- While New Mexico allows you to renew your license every 4 or 8 years as a personal option, drivers 71–79 have to renew every 4 years
- Drivers 75 and older must prove adequate vision every renewal and must renew in person
- Drivers over 79 must renew every single year
- NM is rated as the 10th most difficult state to get a license
- New Mexico was one of only four states to post a decrease in road fatalities from 2019 to 2020
Example 2, Ohio:
- While Ohio allows you to renew your license every 4 or 8 years as a personal option, drivers over 65 have to renew every 4 years
- Drivers over 65 and older must prove adequate vision every renewal and must renew in person
- There are no additional restrictions past 65
- Ohio is rated as the 2nd-easiest state to get a license, eclipsed only by SD
- Ohio posted a 6.7% increase in road fatalities from 2019 to 2020
Conclusion? Being too old to drive has even more of an impact on road unsafety than giving out drivers’ licenses in cereal boxes does.
I feel sorry for old people who have no other way to get around, I really do. Letting blind people with dementia unsafely operate motor vehicles so they can run people over while trying to get to grocery stores and medical appointments isn’t a solution, nor is it an acceptable stopgap till public transportation can pick up the slack. It’s gotta stop right now.
Better title: the UN decides to waste everyone’s time by floating a pie-in-the-sky universal money ID that won’t change anything, instead of being effective at handling things that actually matter.
For an organization with the scope of the United Nations, they ethically cannot use their resources on things besides ending wars, injustice, oppression, tyranny, and hunger. The people who put together this idea should be tasked with 40 hours a week of defending the concept in lengthy debates against crazy people who think it’s the number of the beast, which would be a fitting punishment for wasting everyone’s time with it.
People think Google is in the business of providing services. They aren’t. They’re in the business of data collection and their services exist to facilitate that. Useful data dries up, service shuts down, every time. It sounds harsh but people who still use Google services are just setting themselves up to get fucked over.
Which is almost literally a tale as old as time. This sequence:
- invade another country to take their shit
- oops it’s not going so well
- hire mercenaries with no morals to wreck stuff
- don’t pay your mercenary bills and/or attack them for being too powerful
- the mercenaries sack your own cities
That’s not just modern times, and it’s not even just medieval times: I’m pretty sure at least one Assyrian king was deposed that way. People like Putin are doomed to repeat history, it’s their lot in life.
It’s like when people bitch about having fighter jets fly over a baseball game. We don’t rent F-16s from Lockheed every time we want to take one out, they’re paid for already, and pilots need training. But I’m sure they’re the same kind of people who don’t understand why it’s useful for military pilots to run drills on things like being in a specific place at a specific speed and making it line up at the exact right time. I say complain all you want about glorification of the military-industrial complex, but don’t take the line that it’s some atypically expensive cost to the taxpayer.
Anecdotally, I’ve met almost two dozen people with high level engineering degrees who were about as sharp as a bowling ball when it came to literally everything besides their coursework. Each one of them with whom I shared my perspective that “critical thinking skills are all that matter for measuring intelligence, not the ability to memorize data; chimpanzees can do that better than we can anyway” reacted very negatively, which I’ve always thought was interesting.
I don’t want to imply that everyone with an advanced STEM degree is a dullard and a weiner, a drone who can only produce results if he memorizes reams of other peoples’ work. It’s just an overrepresentation peculiar to that kind of field, just like how the humanities have an eternal plague of arrogant dicks who got philosophy all figured out at age 14.
It reminds me of how Weird Al’s wonderful movie UHF didn’t do great in theaters, being released in the summer of 1989. That meant it was competing against the following blockbusters: