Re: Colorado hands-free driving law taking effect in the new year

badgolferman wrote on Thu, 12 Dec 2024 11:46:15 -0000 (UTC) :

First let me say I use two different newsreaders, NewsTap and Xananews.
When I reply to one of your crossposted messages with mobile NewsTap,
it will not send to that many groups and I must remove them in my
reply.  My desktop Xananews has no such limitation.
 There's an old adage which you may have heard before:  "Scientists have
discovered that people will believe anything when you claim scientists
have discovered it."
 Since I work in the science field and actually have seen how the
sausage is made, I take with a grain of salt "consensus scientific
facts" much of the time.  It's not the actual data gathering which is
suspect, it's how the data is processed and the inherent biases of the
scientists and researchers which are tasked with presenting the data to
the scientific community.
 One example is how you often hear the current administration has
deported more illegal aliens than the previous administration.  This
statistic is used to justify border policies.  Taken in a vacuum with
no other input it sounds great, but when reading other news sources or
listening to the people on the ground you find out that is a misleading
statistic.  Maybe the "fact" is true, but it ignores other facts that
vastly higher multitudes of illegal aliens are being let through the
borders unchecked.  The sheer frustration of citizens in blue states
which flipped red this election cycle is a good indication of how
people don't believe official government statistics.  The jobs,
inflation and economic statistics are yet other examples of misleading
reports.
 We all have inherent biases which make us look at "facts" in a
different way.  I do not deny that my own biases shaped by my
experiences cause me to doubt distracted cell phone use doesn't lead to
additional accidents, as you contend.  The "fact" that distracted
drivers affect the rest of us on the road cannot be denied either.
 I am now ready to hear your theory of why the accident rate of cell
phone distracted driving has not skyrocketed.

Hi badgolferman,
Let's ignore everything I've said so we can concentrate on what *you* think
happened to the accident rate during the years that there was clearly a
meteoric rise in cellphone ownership rates in the United States.
FACTS:
1. We all agree cellphones didn't exist before a certain date, right?
2. We all agree their ownership rates skyrocketed in a few years, right?
3. We all agree that USA ownership has plateaued at almost 100% right?
Do we agree on those basic facts (because if we can't agree on the most
basic of starting points, there's no sense proceeding further, right?)?
ASSUMPTIONS:
A. We all assume distractions are a major cause of accidents, right?
B. We all assume cellphones are an added distraction, right?
C. We all intuit that must have made the accident rate skyrocket, right?
Notice there may NOT be agreement on those three points, so we need to
flesh out if we need to agree or not, particularly on the last point above.
Assuming we agree on all six tenets above, my only question remaining is
what do you think happened to the US accident rate between these 3 periods:
a. Before cellphones
b. During cellphone ownership meteoric rise
c. After that - where it plateaued at nearly 100% ownership
What do *YOU* claim happened to the accident rate?
Did it double? Triple? Quadruple? Pentuple?
What?
If you can't answer that question then I don't know what your position is.
Nobody could until you state what you think happened to the accident rate.