Dropout
1 HN recommender · recommended in 17 months, 2019–2024
3:25 · 8.7M views · Oct 12, 2015
An Adam Ruins Everything segment claiming that jaywalking became a crime through campaigns by the auto industry. It is a short, comedic history of how streets were reclaimed for cars.
HN uses it as shorthand for the argument that car dominance was manufactured by deliberate propaganda.
20 comments from Hacker News
I rarely recommend videos but this one in re: Jaywalking is funny and informative: "The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime (Adam Ruins Everything)" this video I was telling a coworker about this once and he didn't believe me, but it was basically a deliberate and successful attempt at mass social engineering through domestic propaganda. We went from vilifying reckless drivers as "speed demons" to vilifying pedestrians as "jays" (yokels or hicks.)
FWIW this is my go to source for the story: "The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime (Adam Ruins Everything)" this video It's brief and fairly entertaining.
The two things are orthogonal. Item: humans driving huge machines on every street is and always has been totally insane. The reason we do it is because of a deliberate domestic propaganda campaign. No really. See: "The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime (Adam Ruins Everything)" this video You can see the origin of the situation from this extraordinary film shot just before the 1906 Earthquake: "San Francisco, a Trip down Market Street, April 14, 1906" [LINK] You can see that horses, horse-drawn wagon and carts, and pedestrians could and did mix together in the public way. There are also early automobiles, and the problem is obvious: cars accelerate faster than horses. Already we can see reckless driving by cars that is only possible due to their ability to accelerate quickly! BTW, just for the record, cars themselves are generally awesome. It must be said. Cars are cool. It's only when we use them as mass-transportation and/or mix them with non-car-driving people (bikes, pedestrians, etc.) that it becomes mad. - - - - Ergo, safe automatic automobiles can't come soon enough! - - - - However, none of the above justifies using random people without their consent as test dummies in an open-air testing facility for massive, fast robots. That's also insane. - - - - To me it seems obvious that you do two things: 1) Start with slow light robots! Build a nerf foam golf cart that is limited to 5mph and get that working reliably. Going straight for Knight Industries Two Thousand right out o
I just want to take a moment to remind everybody just how insane car travel is as a mode of transportation. Sure, it's convenient , but at what cost!? Air pollution, tire particle pollution, covering the Earth with asphalt, etc. Also, and this is gruesome so brace yourself, car travel causes incredible amounts of human suffering. Car collisions cause something like 40,000 fatalities per year just in the USA. In fact, more Americans have died in car crashes than in all the wars we've fought. I call it the "Mayhem Lottery". Anyone can play, little kids, old people, pregnant women, everybody. And the tickets cost nothing, all you have to do is be near a street. (Sometimes cars will even crash into buildings. People have been killed by cars while sitting in their own homes watching TV!) Now the weird, bizarre thing about this state of affairs is that it is the result of a successful mass-marketing campaign! When cars were first introduced people complained of reckless drivers ("Speed Demons"), the car companies and the government got together and created a deliberate plan to change public attitude (about being run down in the street by car drivers), they actually coined the term "jaywalker" to describe people using the street in the traditional fashion (pedestrians.) It sounds nuts, because it is, yet it really happened: cf. "The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam Ruins Everything) this video - - - - Edit to add: You can see the trasition period in the "a Trip down Market Stre
I've said this before, so apologies to those who've heard it already, but I believe testing big fast robots in public is irresponsible. These machines have already killed people. We know that human drivers kill and maim tens of thousands of people every year, so it's pretty obvious that robotic drivers will do so too, unless and until they become better drivers than humans. If somebody wanted to let their killer robots move around in public with limited supervision it would be obviously illegal, but somehow dressing up as cars falls into a weird blind spot. I've encountered at least two major objections: > Human drivers kill people so it's okay if robot drivers do too. But is it really okay for human drivers to kill people? Our complacency in the face of automotive mayhem is the result of a deliberate campaign of social engineering: "The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam Ruins Everything) this video We went from decrying "speed demons" (reckless drivers who hit pedestrians) to victim-blaming "jaywalkers". Now, for example, more Americans have been killed by cars than by all the wars we've fought. (And that's just counting collisions, not deaths from air pollution, etc.) > The machines will eventually be safer than human drivers (a belief I share) but they need to practice in real world conditions to do it. So build a model city, populate it with people willing to take the risks, and test them there. (This is setting aside the additional idea of doing extensive modeling in