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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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Reminds me of similar "Vision Zero" initiatives for traffic deaths to be reduced to exactly zero. Those weren't successful, either.

Some are surely inevitable for baseline physics / kinetics reasons, but near-enough zero is possible with self-driving cars tied to ubiquitous traffic monitoring systems.

We don't actually know that. We're far from cracking meaningful autonomy, and we have no idea what would be the impact of widespread adoption.

Zero is just a dumb target for almost anything. Instead of taking interventions that improve QALY's the most, we do stupid shit because "even one person dying of X is too many".

That's assuming that interventions are even positive at all. Post 2020 interventions to reduce police shootings very quickly and obviously made the world a much worse place for almost everyone.

The only way we get to zero is by eliminating the police entirely and just letting gangs run society.