I hope you’re counting the transmission and entire driveline in that number, all the way out to rims and tires. 500kg is approximately one quarter the weight of a modern mid-size vehicle.

I’m strapped into my chair at the prospect of another Matt math lesson.

I hope you’re counting the transmission and entire driveline in that number, all the way out to rims and tires. 500kg is approximately one quarter the weight of a modern mid-size vehicle.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=500kg+to+pounds

If you have a better way to make a car or the infrastructure, let’s do it.

I propose privatizing all roads immediately. Auction them off. I’ll gladly buy the strip in front of my house.

At a young age with full tax-fed pension and health care.

The car combines power engineering inefficiency (strapping a 500 kg engine and a 1200 kg car body to each 80 kg person) with necessarily imperfect operators; political and other marketing considerations dictate the government must extend license privileges to people who have demonstrated few, and in some cases virtually no skills. This combination means the car requires a greater infrastructure commitment, both in terms of space and money, than any other mode of transportation.

So who does the car make free? Not pedestrians mowed down in crosswalks. Not those of us taxed to pay for the infrastructure. Not people who have had houses and businesses bulldozed to make way for road development.

I also doubt that the Illinois eavesdropping law will be upheld by the federal courts if challenged. The courts seem to uphold the First Amendment more consistently than they do other amendments (e.g., #2 and #4); upholding a bullshit law with an unmistakable chilling effect on the press would be completely out of character for the appellate courts or SCOTUS.

And while we’re at it, fuck the mayor. Rahm Emmanuel is clearly either corrupt or negligent in allowing the CPD to enforce such a law, but aside from that our politicians, especially those in Chicago, need to be told to fuck off every now and then. It’s like slamming the door in the Queen’s face: it does a nation good.

Also, as I’ve written before, God bless Janusz Kopycinski and the CTA. Bad cops don’t go home.

I’m sure a few key players will be allowed to retire. Problem solved.

Read the article, look at the photos, watch the video. Spraying pepper-spray down someone’s throat? That is attempted murder. Why didn’t someone shoot the damn cops? Oh yeah, because they are The State and even with full knowledge that they are being filmed, do not GIVE A SHIT because The State is accountable to no one.

Dismantle The State.

Conventional wisdom. Pfft. Conventional wisdom would have you drilling a hole in your skull to let the evil spirits out.

How about elderly driving? Drowsy driving? Driving while hopped up on cough medication?

Let’s not get distracted too much. The fact is that driving drunk isn’t a genuine crime because there is no victim, but tax-feeding power pigs use it as an excuse to control you.

Now you’ve got two variables. The drunk-driving-fatality statitistic in that article only has one: “sober” or not “sober.”

I think we are making a reasonable assumption that there are more sober drivers at any given time than drunk drivers. This is actually wherevthe math very much supports the idea that these measures are unnecessary. The rate of drunk driving is low, as are the chances of actually causing an accident while drunk.

Convential wisdom says drunk driving has a higher rate of accidents than sober driving. I think the onus is on you to show otherwise.

Let’s say for argument that 1% of drivers are drunk at a given time and out of the total number of accidents, 50% of accidents are caused by drunk driving. Say there are 1000 people driving and 10 accidents. 5 accidents are caused by drunk drivers and 5 by sober drivers. This makes the crash rate of drunk drivers 5/10, or 50%. 5 out of the 990 sober drivers have an accident. That puts the rate of sober drivers crashing at 5/990 or around 0.5%.

In this scenario, drunk driving is 100 times more dangerous than sober driving.

Like another commentator said, I agree with your sentiment. But the math is incorrect.

Now you’ve got two variables. The drunk-driving-fatality statitistic in that article only has one: “sober” or not “sober.”

Explain.

How can it not?

More than two-thirds is always the complement of “Nearly one-third.”

40 percent is damn near half.

“The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the U.S. defines a fatal crash as alcohol-related if either a driver or a non-motorist had a measurable or estimated BAC of 0.01 g/dl or above.”

http://www.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/research/alcoholcountries/background_&_intro.htm

The data says sober drivers are twice as dangerous as drunk drivers and flipping a coin determines seatbelt efficacy.

The data defiantly does not say this, but it also does not say this program is in any way useful.