The evidence that car seats save lives is significantly weaker that you probably believe, as I detailed in another comment in this thread. But look: even if car seats make sense for a typical 5 year old on a typical drive in their typical car (which is a higher evidentiary burden than you might think), a mandate imposes a huge logistical tax that makes many normal things completely infeasible or impractical:
- travel with many kids (nope, physically can't carry 4 car seats plus luggage)
- using a taxi, e.g. to go see a movie (nope, can't carry a car seat into the theater)
- carpooling with other families (I'll drive them, you pick up? Nope, we'd have to shuffle car seats around.)
- rides with grandparents or other family members (sorry, we'd have to deliver the car seat to them first)
- splitting kids between two vehicles for errands (let's spend 10m wrestling car seats from one car to the other first)
The whole texture of independent childhood is altered by car seat mandates! Everything gets filtered through "is there a car seat available?". If you haven't experienced this, it's hard to describe - and I think it's absolutely a case where tradeoffs like "how will this affect quality of life?" are completely overridden because "well, if it just saves one life..."
> Car seats and booster seats significantly reduce the risk of fatal injury in crashes by 71% for infants and 54% for toddlers (1-4 years old), saving over 11,000 lives in the US since 1975
> Booster seats reduce the risk of serious injury for children aged 4-8 by 45% compared to seatbelts alone.
It's from the AI summary because it was the most quotable but the articles I found say pretty much the same thing. Seems pretty solid to me.
> If you haven't experienced this, it's hard to describe - and I think it's absolutely a case where tradeoffs like "how will this affect quality of life?" are completely overridden because "well, if it just saves one life..."
If you haven't experienced your children dying unnecessarily because it was inconvenient to make them safe it's hard to describe..
What articles did you find, exactly? What primary evidence are they basing their claims on? Many of the numbers you'll find with a google search are unclear about what they're comparing to - I believe both of the fatality numbers above (71% and 54%) are relative to completely unrestrained kids, which is not the relevant comparison.
The 45% number I specifically discuss in the other comment, but every independently reproducible study using publicly available data has found much smaller effects, around 10-25% for minor injuries and no statistically significant difference in severe injuries.
To be clear, I'm not saying "don't use car seats," I'm saying that the evidence doesn't support mandating them through age 8 (or 12!).
Our kids would be much safer if we drove everywhere at 15mph - less convenient, but it would prevent many unnecessary deaths. Unfortunately, it is impossible to do anything in the world without risk. So we're forced to balance convenience against safety every day, whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not.
It notes this, which might be pertinent to your comment regarding how the overall statistics don't show the trends you expect:
> A NHTSA study found that while most parents and caregivers believe they know how to correctly install their car seats, about half (46%) have installed their child’s car seat incorrectly.
> Children in booster seats in the back seat are 45% less likely to be injured in a crash than children *using a seat belt alone*.
That's about as much effort as I'm willing to put into this conversation. I'll finish off by saying I'm not American and these rules exist outside the US as well - I have a hard time believing so many countries would separately implement this (or similar) mandate if it was as unfounded as you claim.
We have 4 kids. Before we had our 3rd, we needed to buy a new vehicle solely because we couldn't fit 3 car seats into the back of our old car. And when traveling with kids, carrying 4 gigantic car seats plus your other luggage is not exactly as easy as you might think! It essentially rules out solo parent travel with all 4 kids. Transferring car seats between two cars, or installing car seats in a taxi, is a serious pain.
Furthermore, the evidence that car seats actually benefit safety is significantly less robust than you might think. The "mountains of evidence" that do exist for things like 70% reductions in fatalities, bizarrely enough, generally compare the rate of fatalities for car seats vs completely unrestrained kids. When you compare the rate of fatalities in car seats to kids wearing adult seat belts, the bulk of the evidence suggests essentially no difference. Fatalities happen when the forces involved are catastrophic and sadly a car seat doesn't help much for kids over 2.
Even a back of the envelope comparison makes this extremely plausible: car crash fatalities for kids 9-12 have declined by 72% from 1978-2017. If car seats and car seat laws save significant numbers of lives, you'd expect that the fatality rate for kids 0-8, who are generally in car seats, to have decreased much more. But it hasn't, it declined by 73% over the same period.
Now, car seats and boosters do seem to moderately reduce non-fatal injuries - huge spread of estimates here, most clustering around 10-25%. It's reasonable for most people to use car seats or boosters most of the time based on this alone, IMO, especially for young kids. But do they justify a mandate? IMO: no. Absolutely not.
Worth mentioning that mandates probably do succeed in one thing: they reduce the number of children born at all by at least 57x more than they prevent child fatalities. Roughly 8,000 kids per year, 145,000 kids since 1980. That's with the (unlikely, as discussed above) assumption that car seats do in fact save significant numbers of lives. But it's also entirely possible that they've prevented hundreds of thousands of kids from being born, somewhat reduced the nonfatal injury rate, and saved essentially no lives.
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046 (car seat mandates "led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000")
Note that both the 45% and 59% estimate for injury reduction and the 28% estimate for fatality reduction all come from one research group using a proprietary data set. Everything that's independently reproducible points towards small or zero effect on fatalities and modest effects on injuries.
Yep. As I understand it, there's no statistical difference between a car seat and a seat belt over age two. We've known this for a very long time, too. But it's easy to make an emotional appeal to do something to make the world safer for children, even if what you're doing doesn't make any difference.
In the hypothetical scenario where car seats have only downsides, then of course I’m against a mandate.
There is a difference between cherry picking studies that back up your view point and how medical experts set policy though.
Experts review all of the data, and ignore outliers like a paper published in a law journal that suggests car seats are the primary reason families have shrunk from having three to two kids since the 80’s
You’ve funnily proven the point of how willing people are to put immense burdens on others in the name of safety.
There is a non-zero amount of deaths the car seat law would prevent. The burden will discourage larger families and will contribute to population decline far larger than the lives saved.
You’re not only arguing for it, you’re doing it in a way as if preventing death is such an obvious single dimension to optimize that you’re calling people irrational because they are against something that reduces fatalities.
Your same argument is what leads to prohibition and a long list of other things that suck the color out of life in the interest of “safety”.
In this conversation, you have repeatedly referred to "all of the data" and "mountains of data," yet you have posted none. Meanwhile I have posted every major study on both sides of the debate! Your argument seems to be that:
- the experts have told people to use car seats
- experts wisely base policy on "all of the data"
- therefore, "all of the data" must support the claim that car seats save lives
If we're going to discuss the question of whether experts have set policy well or poorly in a particular case, then such a strong prior on "experts always set policy well and based on the best available evidence" kind of assumes the conclusion, doesn't it?
Experts almost always set policy better than non-experts doing their own research. Especially on complex topics.
There is no point in two amateurs arguing over a topic they don't understand.
All I can do is refer to the publicly available reasoning and studies of experts, which have evidence and conclusions opposite of the amateur conclusion above.
Child car seat regulations are state laws passed by state politicians. They are not experts in any sense of the word, and generally don't bother with evidence or studies when creating said laws.
Risk tolerance is a value judgment, not an empirical fact waiting to be discovered.
Competent experts could tell you how much safer you would be if you wore a helmet to drive your car. They can't tell you how much you should value that extra bit of safety.
Personal risk is a value judgement. The government steps in when your decisions impact the life of an unconsenting third party, like a child.
Can you point to a single competent expert who recommends the average driver should wear a helmet while driving? Again, there is a difference between one study showing helmets reduce injury in crashes, and an expert reviewing the problem as a whole and making a recommendation.
We're obviously richer, too. Your grandparents had a cozy house - did they have good fresh food all winter when growing up? Could they keep food from going bad in the summer? What about indoor plumbing? These things are so ubiquitous now it's hard to even remember that they aren't just part of the basic fabric of reality.
It's easy to look back with nostalgia (and literal survivor bias - "my ancestors all survived") at the past. But if you actually look at history you will see that "what people have had for millenia" was ... pretty awful. It's an AMAZING time to be alive.
1870 is not a great span of time when OP is comparing to some idyllic village life unencumbered by urbanism. Late 19th century had many people in a “rat race” in the city, like work twelve hour days six or seven days a week in a factory type of dead-end race.
But there was something that happened later:
> For those countries with long-run data in this chart, we can see three distinct periods: From 1870 to 1913 there was a relatively slow decline; then from 1913 to 1938 the decline in hours steepened in the midst of the powerful sociopolitical, technological, and economic changes that took shape with World War I, the Great Depression, and the lead-up to World War II; and then after an uptick in hours during and just after World War II, the decline in hours continued for many countries, albeit at a slower pace and with large differences between countries.
The god knows what “sociopolitical changes” could have been about.
While there was a rat race in the city, typical farmlife was more brutal: work from early childhood and then from dawn to dusk. City dwellers had at least one day off per week, while working with animals is a job without holidays.
Say I own a spoon company. The government says "hey, I'd like to buy a million spoons from you!" I say "sure, sounds great." We sign a contract stating that I'll give them 1M spoons and they'll send me $1M.
Then the government comes to me and says "hey, actually, turns out we need 500,000 forks and 300,000 knives and only 200,000 spoons."
I say "no, we are a spoon company. Very passionate about spoons. Producing forks and knives would be an entirely different business, and our contract was for spoons."
The military now threatens to destroy my company unless I give them forks and knives instead of spoons.
You say "the voters and congress tell the military how to use utensils, not SpoonCo. Shifting the decision to SpoonCo takes power away from the citizenship."
The military can sign contracts if they wish! They can decline to sign contracts if they wish!
But private citizens can also choose whether to sign or not sign contracts with the military. Threatening to destroy their business if they don't sign contracts the military likes (or to renegotiate existing contracts in the military's favor) is a huge violation.
This article is a great example of motivated reasoning. It's comparing two wildly different numbers: the Ford Pinto number is the total number of deaths that the NHTSA found to have occurred in rear-impact crashes that resulted in a fire. The Cybertruck number is the total number of deaths from all incidents involving fire and a Cybertruck.
According to the Wikipedia article about the Pinto:
> At the time only 1% of automobile crashes would result in fire and only 4% of fatal accidents involved fire, and only 15% of fatal fire crashes are the result of rear-end collisions.
So as a back of the envelope calculation, we'd expect the total number of Pinto fire fatalities to be about 6.5x the fire fatality rate specific to rear-end collisions. Even then, I doubt that statistic would include incidents like the Las Vegas case where the man shot himself in the head while detonating an improvised explosive in his Cybertruck.
This doesn't even get into sample size - the Tesla numbers are based on only 3 incidents and 5 fatalities:
- one, a single-car accident in which 3 people died,
- two, a single-car accident in which 1 person died, and
- three, the driver shot himself in the head
If, say, the first driver hadn't had any passengers and the third driver had not been included in the sample (because it's not a collision), the Cybertruck's rate would be 60% lower. With such a small sample, it's very silly to make confident assertions about the relative risks here.
Finally, both articles are only talking about fire risks, not overall safety record. I would definitely bet that the Cybertruck has a significantly lower fatality rate per mile than a 1975 Pinto purely based on changes in vehicle safety testing and engineering since the 1970s.
> It’s funny because the Ford Pinto is thought of as an example of an unreliable death trap but the deaths from Tesla’s poor craftsmanship and design heavily outweigh the Pinto by a wide margin.
What are the stats you're referencing here? I find this difficult to believe, as modern cars are generally much safer than cars from the 1970s and Teslas seem to perform well in crash tests. They'd need to be incredibly dangerous relative to other modern cars to be as dangerous as a typical car from the 1970s.
> An analysis published Thursday by the auto news website FuelArc found that, in their one year of existence, the approximately 34,000 Cybertrucks on the roads had five fire fatalities, giving them a fatality rate of 14.5 per 100,000 units. That’s 17 times the fatality rate of the Ford Pintos, whose famously flawed gas tank design on the car’s rear end led to 27 reported fire fatalities in its nine years on the road, resulting in a fatality rate of 0.85 per 100,000 units, according to FuelArc.
The Ford Pinto number is the total number of deaths that the NHTSA found to have occurred between 1970 and mid-1977 (so not the full 9-year period) in rear-impact crashes that resulted in a fire.
This is not comparable to the total number of fatalities involving fire and a Cybertruck (regardless of the impact type, or lack thereof, e.g. the Las Vegas fatality was due to the guy shooting himself in the head). Not a single one of the three Cybertruck incidents would have been included in the Ford Pinto statistic because none of them were rear-impact crashes that resulted in a fire.
According to the Wikipedia article about the Pinto:
> At the time only 1% of automobile crashes would result in fire and only 4% of fatal accidents involved fire, and only 15% of fatal fire crashes are the result of rear-end collisions.
So we'd expect the total fire fatality rate to be about 6.5x the fatality rate specific to rear-end collisions that resulted in fire.
And of course, saying "Teslas are more dangerous than Ford Pintos" is very different than saying "the Tesla Cybertruck has a higher rate of fire fatalities than the Ford Pinto." Even the latter statement would be incorrect but the former is simply absurd.
A single Cybertruck weighs as much as three Ford Pintos. We should be sure to include Newton's second law in our evaluations of which is the more dangerous vehicle.
The good faith version of this would be that he is telling the truth, he didn't share or offer to share the photos with anyone, and the rumors the plaintiff heard about people seeing the photos were just rumors. (I think it's clear that at the very least, he mentioned the nude photos to at least one other person - otherwise no rumor could get started in the first place - which is obviously bad behavior, but not nearly as bad as actually sharing the photos.)
Because the sharing of the photos with other people wasn't established by the evidence, the court was just ruling on whether the DA had violated the plaintiffs rights by transferring the data dump from the plaintiff's phone to the sheriff, and whether that violation was obvious/established enough from prior court rulings to revoke QI. It had nothing to do with sharing the photos themselves with anyone (the DA didn't know the data dump had the photos when he shared it).
I've come across compromising data over the years--and never have I referred to it in any way that would permit identification of the person. Either it warrants going to the police or it stays private, there's no in between.
Do you honestly think, as a principled position, that police officers should be personally liable for enforcing a law which is later decided to be unconstitutional?
For example, if a police officer in 1994 arrested someone for violating the Gun Free School Zones act (struck down as unconstitutional in 1995), should they be personally liable for the damages? Should the judge who decided the case?
Similarly, if a police officer in NYC arrested someone in 2018 for violating the ban on "gravity knives" (struck down as unconstitutional in 2019), should they be personally liable?
If a police officer in Washington, DC arrested someone for violating the city's ban on handguns in 2007 (struck down by the Supreme Court in 2008), should they be personally liable?
Would it be a good thing if police officers and officials refuse to enforce Washington state's ban on "assault weapons", or Oregon's magazine capacity limit, because the "conservative turn" of the Supreme Court means that the law might get struck down as unconstitutional, and then they'd be personally liable for the damages?
I think it's clear that QI sometimes leads to bad outcomes, but honestly, I'm not sure how the system would function without some similar concept.
I think that letting it go to a jury is reasonable. QI short-circuits the entire jury process, ending the case almost immediately. Letting a lawsuit develop and letting a jury decide if the Officers actions were reasonable or not, given the totality of the circumstances, seems the correct solution to the problem, which as you note is somewhat tricky. After all, the officers who arrested the original 15 Episcopal Priests were found not liable by a jury of their peers. If it worked for them, why do you think it wouldn't work now?
Yes, police officers will have to deal with more lawsuits, but that's not an outcome that bothers me particularly. Society grants them a great deal of rights to violence that the rest of us do not have, they should likewise face greater scrutiny for their choices, or they are not worthy of holding that responsibility.
Note that Colorado removed QI by law, and made officers personally liable (up to certain limits) and seems to not be any sort of anarchy.
Letting it get to a jury opens them up to a flood of baseless lawsuits. People seeking to get go-away money. There needs to be a high fence and it needs to be determined by forces other than the person bringing the lawsuit.
You can easily come up with opposite scenarios: if the law says you go to jail for being a certain race and sitting in a certain place, or for being certain sex and wearing certain clothes, should police officers suffer no consequences for enforcing such things? We've long established that "just following orders" is not a sufficient excuse.
There are cases where it's reasonable for a police officer to enforce a law that turns out to be unconstitutional and there are cases where it's not. Distinguishing between those cases is what the courts are for. Giving officers blanket immunity is not the way to handle it.
Every time I'm out and about, I have to wonder if I'm making some mistake that's going to get me in trouble with the law. Why should police be exempt from this?
often legal by their countries law hence the excuse "i was just following orders/my laws" being similar to cops "following the law" even in the clear face of it being wrong
The same way it does everything, by letting it go to a court and have them figure it out, like every one crime or civil action - why would the cops be different if they are doing illegal things?
This is not a sliding slope, its just acknowledging police are also just people.
It's worth noting that 3 of the 4 examples above deal with guns. The 4th deals with knives. ... Thank God we spend so much time and energy arguing about weapons, guided by a document that was written over 200 years ago. It would be a nightmare if, as a society, we spent that energy on something like curing disease or providing for the needy. Sheesh. /s
- travel with many kids (nope, physically can't carry 4 car seats plus luggage)
- using a taxi, e.g. to go see a movie (nope, can't carry a car seat into the theater)
- carpooling with other families (I'll drive them, you pick up? Nope, we'd have to shuffle car seats around.)
- rides with grandparents or other family members (sorry, we'd have to deliver the car seat to them first)
- splitting kids between two vehicles for errands (let's spend 10m wrestling car seats from one car to the other first)
The whole texture of independent childhood is altered by car seat mandates! Everything gets filtered through "is there a car seat available?". If you haven't experienced this, it's hard to describe - and I think it's absolutely a case where tradeoffs like "how will this affect quality of life?" are completely overridden because "well, if it just saves one life..."
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