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Comment by VikingCoder | Hacker News Reader

If there's a law that says that private vehicles can't Stop, Stand, Park, etc. in the right lane, then it should be enforced.

If you think there should be a law, then that's also a fine discussion.

But from my standpoint, people are complaining about the lack of enforcement of a law that doesn't exist.

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If you are a passenger in a vehicle that stops in a lane of traffic long enough to cause a traffic pileup, you speak up and fix it.

That's what you do.

Is the parent commenter suggesting that nobody riding the google bus has the gumption and the decency to sanity check an obviously ungracious and impolite behavior ?

It would be much worse for the city, if all of those people drove their own cars to work.

Have these people done the ground-work of asking Google to move the route? To consider that they might be blocking traffic?

Or did they show up one day and decide to make Googlers late to work with no warning?

Does everything in life need to be controlled by laws. I'm sure I don't succeed all the time, but I always try to just be considerate of the other people around me, even if there is no law preventing the thing that I want to do.

That's because you're a person. Companies do not act with such civility -- they're not structured to do so. That's why companies need to be regulated far more than individuals -- basic human decency reduces the need for a lot of laws.

A company is not a living being. There is a person driving the bus. His boss who told him to park in the middle of traffic is a person. And so on all the way up the hierarchy of bosses and stakeholders.

We should expect civility from people even if they are acting from behind the shield of incorporation.

Regulation is ok, but its not the best. Ideally we could talk face to face with some humans and ask if they realize the consequences of their decisions.

But I understand this isnt the way things work.

You seem to be under the impression that a system cannot have emergent behavior beyond that of its components (i.e., a corporation is made of people and thus a corporation can be expected to behave and respond like a person).

This is incorrect. For example, you are "intelligent," but this does not imply that there is a "little man" inside your brain which is also "intelligent."

> A company is not a living being. There is a person driving the bus. His boss who told him to park in the middle of traffic is a person. And so on all the way up the hierarchy of bosses and stakeholders. We should expect civility from people even if they are acting from behind the shield of incorporation.

Does the Milgram experiment ring any bell ?

There's no laws preventing kids from pressing every button in an elevator, but that's pretty irritating when it happens. Now imagine the same kid doing it in the elevator that you have to use every day.

Yeah sure but that doesn't give you the right to say, slap the kid. You have to go through formal channels like talking to his/her parents.

New people people coming in to a city have to learn to live in that city. But the opposite is equally true. The people in the city will have to learn to live with those new people. You don't get extra privileges for 'being there first'

I don't know, slapping sounds good. Too many have an attitude of no one is going to do anything. Changing their paradigm a little could be helpful. :O)

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