Saving hundreds of thousands of lives was a weird decision?

Seatbelts are great, and I wouldn't want to ride a car without one.

However people who don't want to wear seatbelts generally only endanger themselves. So why force them against their will?

Same reason you try to save somebody who wants to jump from a bridge? Cost is marginal and potential benefit is huge.

Additionally if it was optional people would forget to do it more often even if they don't consciously choose to risk their lives for no reason.

BTW they are not only endangering themselves - they also endanger their kids.

> Same reason you try to save somebody who wants to jump from a bridge? Cost is marginal and potential benefit is huge.

If it's a considerate decision, I support people's right to ending their own life. Though I grant that jumping off a bridge is inconsiderate.

> BTW they are not only endangering themselves - they also endanger their kids.

So the seatbelt mandate should only apply when kids are in the car, or only to kids?

> If it's a considerate decision, I support people's right to ending their own life.

I support euthanasia after proper waiting period and psych evaluation.

But if I see someone trying to end their life on a street I'm trying to stop them. It's far more likely it's impulsive and not a rational, thought-out decision.

Same with not using seatbelts. There's basically zero reasons not to, so the probability of it being someone exercising their freedoms after a careful consideration is basically zero.

> So the seatbelt mandate should only apply when kids are in the car, or only to kids?

It should apply always, because the benefit is literally life and death, and the cost is basically nothing. Why complicate law, then?

In addition to all the sensible reasons others have pointed out, if you crash at a high enough speed without a seatbelt you become a projectile. If you are in the back seat when this happens, you are most certainly a danger to those in the front seats.

If the seatbelt saves your life from an accident in which you were at fault, it is easier to prosecute and extract compensation from the living than from the dead.

> In addition to all the sensible reasons others have pointed out, if you crash at a high enough speed without a seatbelt you become a projectile.

This pales in comparison to the projectile that your care already is.

In any case, just work out the expected level of danger, convert to monetary units, and tax people who don't wear seatbelts.

> If the seatbelt saves your life from an accident in which you were at fault, it is easier to prosecute and extract compensation from the living than from the dead.

Tax non-seatbelt-wearers ahead of time. Or make sure everyone has insurance, get the money from the insurance, and beancounters at the insurace will make sure premiums go up for non-seatbelt-wearers. (And use the full force of the law against people without insurance. Or have some clever mechanism design, like selling default insurance with petrol, but give people with proven insurance a discount on that, etc.)

> However people who don't want to wear seatbelts generally only endanger themselves.

If they sell the vehicle, the decision was already made for the new owner (nobody would buy separate aftermarket seatbelts for a used car). So no, they also endanger other people. Mandating them outright is the right decision.

No one is forcing you to buy a specific used car.

> (nobody would buy separate aftermarket seatbelts for a used car)

I would assume most people who want seatbelts in the first place would buy a car that comes with seatbelts, even when buying a used car.

You don't need to ask for it. They default to validation.

Might be as simple as cost/effect in resource-constrained environment.

Inflamation uses up resources. When we were hunter-gatherers and had to survive ice ages - it wasn't a good idea to waste calories and vitamins just in case.

Better for 3 people out of 30 to die of flu than for all 30 to starve.

Nowadays the optimal trade-off might be completely different.

Testing vs prod bugs are always FUN.

In my first job we had warehouse management system, and for testing new versions we allowed users to log-in to test environment.

Some employees didn't knew they were supposed to only log in to prod and happily worked in their warehouse accepting deliveries, stocktaking, moving stuff in real world using test db instead of the prod one. We only realized when they moved so much stuff that the inconsistencies db vs reality triggered alarms.

They aren't bullied. They are just paid.

Nobody calls it sequel in my country.

Even people who know because then they have to explain it which wastes time for no benefit.

This is why open source for communication platforms is so important.

Discord WILL disappear at some point and millions of people will lose their communities.

Online communities are far more transient and far less effective than ones rooted in geography. I'm not saying that they don't provide value or aren't worthwhile.

Online communities can rebuild quickly are more resilient in a sense e.g. Digg to Reddit migration.

Discord's just a platform. When Discord will disappear, I don't think it would happen overnight and the communities would have time to decide where to relocate, hopefully for an open-source self-hosted solutions, but more likely for the next hot thing in instant communication. And it's not as if communities don't move from platform to platform already: like wasn't there a big wave of people moving from Digg to Reddit a while back?

for discord emigres, teamspeak still exists, and for social media all you need is an old school forum that hosts videos and voila

The author of the article claims that a mere migration to a new platform does not solve the problem. It just fragments the community. I agree with that. For one or another reason not all people will migrate.

stay on discord then i suppose? if you dont like discord, staying on it is surely not an option though i assumed?

I am not on discord, so I don't have skin in the game. But it depends on the community I guess. If everyone stayed on discord then there would be no change. But any kind of change would probably have some kind of effect, even if all people migrated to a new platform.

I can try to think of a simple scenario. For whatever reason, a user may not be as active in the new platform as they were on discord. This could alter the community dynamics. On a bigger scale this could have visible effects in the actual community.

To be clear, I am not advocating in favor of staying on discord. I just find the concept of community building interesting.

> "Crystallized intelligence" and "emotional intelligence" are the consolation prizes no one really wants.

Speak for yourself. I'd happily retroactively trade a dozen IQ points back in my 20s for emotional intelligence. I'd be much happier.

All we needed to do was accept Ukraine to NATO. Or provide actual military help back in 2014.

Instead we paid more, got hundreds of thousands of people dead, undermined our security guarantees, and all because of short term idiocy/cowardice.

The only reasonable consequence is EU countries getting nukes and getting closer to China.

And we're digging our grave further by Trump undermining NATO guarantees.

They could keep a few hundred no problem.