Robert Exley
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2023–2025
5:30 · 1.7M views · May 31, 2022
A 1967 current-affairs segment interviews habitual drunk drivers just before the UK introduced the breathalyser. They insist they drive fine after drinking.
Used as a historical analogy for public resistance to new safety rules, and as an amusing vox pop.
3 comments from Hacker News
>I feel like you haven't really been listening to the arguments against these types of age-verification-for-websites laws. Or maybe I just have a different conclusion to you? Because I do care, I do try to listen to the arguments. I'm no stranger to advocacy for civil liberties, they are important to me. I think all else being equal, freedom should be valued more over harm prevention. So if I'm for these laws, consider that a sign of how bad these sites have become, not how uninformed I am. > I mean, there's some similarities, of course. But I think there are some very stark differences. Yep of course it's not a 1:1, I agree. I don't mean to imply that people saying the same arguments today are wrong simply because people in the past were, but it does make me think more about it when I spot the same rhetoric. Often both sides have very reasonable concerns, as an example, the question isn't "should we have all or no freedom" Either extreme creates issues, yet both sides have valid arguments worth our time considering. We settle somewhere in the middle. Here's one vox pop with the introduction of breathalizers in UK (1967): this video
> The point is your opinion is concordant with every other poster in this thread, aka hivemind By this logic isn't everyone who is pro-touchscreens also a hivemind? > Nobody is asking whether some people are fine with touchscreens in cars and why that might be the case. Many people are demonstrably bad drivers who are over-confident in their ability and down-play the risk of distractions. When drunk driving was made illegal, people were furious and insisted they were fine to drive drunk and that it was perfectly safe: this video Touchscreens, while convenient and extensible, are demonstrably inferior to static physical controls for saftey-critical contexts.
The rise of the automobile did cause a whole lot of legal and social ramifications that ought to be a good warning. Drunk driving was legal for years, I think it's a good thing to be wary of how things can change and to be ready, as a society, to deal with unintended consequences of this new technology, even if we assume it to be a worthwhile net good. As an amusing tidbit: a reporter asking people about making drunk driving illegal, a little before that came to be a reality: this video