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Comment by jpc0 | Hacker News Reader

- mandatory seat belts

- doors that close and remain closed

- airbags

None of the things you mentioned are particularly an issue with the regulations, they legitimately assist in situations where they are meant to assist. If some feature is mildly inconvenient to you but saves the life of another human being then I feel you can live with the inconvenience.

If you made an argument about subscriptions for heater seating or carplay or some nonsense then you have a valid argument and is in the same line as DRM, mandated actual safety feature not do much.

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Let me enable the features that I consider I might need, such as permanent logging of speed, seatbelts, inclination, etc. Let me disable the features I don't want when I don't want them.

Cars sold to the police have the option to not have their lights permanently on, so it is definitely possible / software setting, it's just inaccessible to regular users.

When some dude runs you over and your family can't prove they were speeding without the data you enjoy these things very much. It would've saved me quite a bit of headache for example.

Having the lights on during the day doesn't help.

Having data on every single thing someone does would be handy for all future crimes. Why don't we push for that level of surveillance. Because we are trying to balance with privacy.

having lights on during the day absolutely helps, especially when overcast or foggy.

Maybe, but why not let me turn them off when I want to?

Because it's not always about you. A lot of examples on why these features are useful are about others who exist around you, not for your own convenience. You live in a society.

Don't the police live and work in the same society? Their cars don't run with the lights on all the time.

Lots of cars don't. You've been ranting about several things that aren't universal, as has been explained several times by several people in this thread. Why the breakthrough now?

We're all replying to:

> Does it not strike anyone else as wrong that a printer that you own has to do the bidding of the government instead of you? [...] Isn't there anyone who believes that your own possessions shouldn't be made to conspire against you?

That's the entire point. Our own possessions are made to conspire against us, and my point was "safety" with quotes. And you seem to support possessions conspiring against their owners in the name of "safety", but that's your choice. Most HNers are against this.

Your point is clumsily made, the examples you chose are bad ones if you're trying to demonstrate overreach.

There's also plenty of the overreach of the kind you're trying to demonstrate that doesn't come from the government, again, as has been illustrated multiple times within the thread. In fact, most of your examples do not come down as orders from the government at all, but the corporations, allowing you to vote with your wallet. I believe the free market is also quite popular on HN.

It absolutely helps. It tells everyone that the car is on!

Anecdote: coming from a country where this is mandatory, visiting a country where it's not, I almost got run over because I assumed a car was parked when I glanced left before crossing the road.

Of course, might not prove that one or the other is safer, but it did show me how often I subconsciously use headlights as an indicator of off (=> stationary => safe) vs. on (=> potentially moving => potentially a "threat")

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