What's government for?

Of course hitting the windshield head first at 40km/hr is roughly equivalent to diving off the 5m board onto concrete. But presumably your skull is thick enough to cope sypkan

i went over the handlebars on my bike twenty mintues ago. ran over a banksia, i think, while tootling along at 15km/h to see a man about a dog at the other end of the street. skin and flesh missing from knees, right elbow and shoulder, blood filling my shoes, t-shirt ripped. "lying in the ditch with blood on your saddle" as bob dylan put it.
glad i had gloves and helmut on. wish i had on my jacket, but it was so hot out i left it in my backpack.

sypkan. the phenomena you allude to is just us being a first world nation. the sanctity of human life is held so high.

how is the whole reaction to shark attacks any different? 1 or 2 deaths a year (if that) across a country our size. yet we are outraged at the loss of a single human life.

and yet 60,000 dogs killed in NSW and we say...ah thats ok. its all for a good cause.

humans have a funny way of being outraged dont you think.

Happy writes "yeah. id thought you'd like that one SD. thats why I waited a day. your welcome to punch me if we were to ever meet."

Mate, I'd rather sit on the rocks at Robe, shout you a coffee, roll you a ciggy, watch you turn green, and have a fucking good laugh about how right we all think we are, all the of time...... bahahahahahaha......

Re your seat belts........ 2 things...... Really hard to police people speeding habits.... Secondly, have you ever seen a "human projectile"? A few weeks ago on one of those "holy shit" facebook pages, they had this shocking dashcam vision of a car accident, where a truck ploughed into the back of a stationary car in a freeway log jam, and that then slingshotted forward into a another stationary car..... Footage actually shook me up a bit..... The chick in the first car hit wasn't wearing a belt.... She was turned into a human cannonball..... Eaither way, seatbelt or not, she had no chance..... Poor woman..... But at least with a seat belt, she would not have endangered anyone else with her flying body.... Now there's not too much you can do about bike riders being cannonballs..... But you can with cars... Sad but true.

what about "childrens crossings" on roads. and "school speed zones". is this nanny state stuff? cant the parents just educate their kids on how to cross the road safely like any ordinary adult?

Well now you are being ridiculous.... And I think you know it..
It doesn't warrant an explanation, happy.

im serious dude. ill explain better.....

how many extra lives are being saved by driving 50kmph in built up areas and 40kmph [in] school zones as compared with the old 60kmph we once accepted.

people are pointing towards lockout laws being nanny state. lets say they are. so if 3am lockout laws save more lives than my 40/50 speed example then how does one rationalise the difference?

the greater point im working towards is that our governments nanny state behaviour has less to do with controlling people as much more do to with how our society views death. we find it completely unacceptable [in] every aspect. and when it happens we look for people to blame. sometimes the government (but usually not). what we have here with nanny state is a function of the peoples mindset.

where's the nanny state when you need it? i need a shot of demerol and my bandages changed.

'Nanny State'! Another meaningless, imported pejorative. In the UK, the nit-wits bleating this are usually the same UCTs* that actually had friggin' nannies for real! And don't get me started on Fran Drescher! Seriously, who's ever had a nanny in the past growing up in Australia?! And in the recent Oz experience, remember when Abbott wanted to chuck a load of money towards the poor old 'nanny' users of this country? So is our 'nanny state' based on backpackers earning sweet FA (but with bed n board chucked in...just ask Richard di Natale how to play it)??

At least, let's come up with a more Aussie term, hey comrades? Nanna State? Big Mother?

*Upper Class Twits

yeah, it's a lazy term. the appropriate term for our government overreach is paternalism.

Yep, that's the real term, it's where it applies that seems to be the BIG issue...well, on here.

Happy writes "what about "childrens crossings" on roads. and "school speed zones". is this nanny state stuff? cant the parents just educate their kids on how to cross the road safely like any ordinary adult?"

No, Happy...... You're not being "serious"......

If I try to olly over a gutter, and I come off, split my head on the gutter and die, that's my beef...... I didn't put anyone else at risk...... However if a child runs across a road distracted, as children children do, an innocent driver can swerve, at 60km an hour lose control, and kill someone else who was NOT even involved with the initial child.... THAT'S the difference... individual liberty is a different thing than protecting the innocent. It's not a hard thing to grasp, Happy.

Got a mate that works at Roads and Maritime NSW. He's a psychologist and worked on a lot of the microsleeps campigns and the like, all of them involving large public surveys and technical breakdown of statistics (where car accidents happen and the circumstances around them).

He gets a bit irate that so much energy and funds get directed toward school zones when stats show fewer accidents and deaths happen there. If they were to follow stats, the public money would be better off spent elsewhere, more lives would be saved too.

However, children push the emotional buttons so it skewers any attempt at rational thought.

Dunno how that falls into the nanny state debate you guys are having but I'm looking for a reason to delay work this arvo and this contribution appears as good as any.

Ha ha

Okay, I'll add to it.

Whats going on when a new school is built on a busy road with a speed limit of say 80 km/h and bang a round-about is put in or pedestrian lights and the speed limit is reduced to 40 km/h twice a day to accomodate the little cherubs and their SUV driving moms during drop off and pick up times?

Surely new schools shouldn't be built in such locations and if they are shouldn't it be dependent on the school and not the local community to solve/ deal with any resultant traffic problems.

Just saw that reference to the universal basic wage in Finland. Nice try. Read the first paragraph which said that it was only in planning stage and would randomly select ..............

I stopped reading there.

So in other words, nothing at all like a universal basic wage. It can't be universal and have random selections, the whole point of it is that everyone gets it regardless, otherwise it just creates more inequality.

One of you good gentlemen suggested that Norway (I think) was doing it. They aren't, nobody is, no country is seriously looking at it yet, although there was a referendum somewhere in Scandinavia last year, got about 25% voting for it, I think. It will come, or the overthrow of capitalism, one or the other.

Fong, we're not 60 years behind Europe, god, get off that Aussie chip on your shoulder bullshit. We still are world leaders in many fields, and way behind in others, just like every other first world country. Politically, pretty much everywhere is up shite creek, it's not Australia, it's the very fundamental idea of democratic capitalism, and only a few, such as Norway, have done well with what are essentially socialist policies to curb the excesses of capitalism. They are hardly Europe, most of Europe is politically further down shite creek than we are, and we don't have the middle east just a short boat trip away.

(We have Indo, and the recent army co-operation brouhaha is something to be very worried about, but you'll have to read up on that to know why)

Bike helmets, well, that law is a good reason not to get on a bike. I vote with my non-pedalling feet. I agree that trauma specialists say that they save lives, but there must be some serious questions about just how much. The helmets are not full-face, so they are only absorbing impact on the skull. The difference they make is largely that they protect the skull, but not really the brain. The brain injury is caused when it hits the skull due to the impact. No helmet actually protects from that. If it protects you from having been impaled by a branch then it will have done a good job, but um, the bike helmets have gaps in them so the branch could still go through your skull.

And all up, the amount of medical dollars saved by pushbike helmets must be minuscule in comparison nearly everything else, car accidents, lifestyle diseases (what a phrase!) and the like must be thousands of times the health dollars, so the law was brought in with not a lot of evidence that the benefit was worth the cost of loss of freedom. But everyone assumes that the cost of loss of freedom is zero, so the benefit must outweigh it.

I don't see that as a clear cut case, but don't care, I just won't ride a pushie.

I like Stu's observation about where the government spends road safety money, it's never about the best impact, it's all about what is politically most apparent. Same with road safety statistics, especially those using reports by police, where speed is always the issue. It is almost never the issue on its own, and is rarely the issue but always mentioned as the primary cause. It's analysis by an aardvark, independent of any firing synapses.

Ok, covered enough subjects yet. What about them going after centrelink debts that aren't debts at all using an algorithm that doesn't take into account their own rules? Was that a set up or what.

Government by shock - jock. Worst of all possible worlds.

There, I've had my spray, your turn again.

SD. the occurrences where a driver doing 50kmph will swerve to miss a child and then hit some-else will indeed exist but it will be a very small statistic. reducing the driving limit to 40kmph wont make much of a difference to that statistic. but your ok to have laws to address that small chance.

but at the same time your not ok to have laws that may help to reduce innocent deaths due to violent morons at 3am in the morning.

you talk to the difference being liberty. but what liberty? liberty to club hop at 3am? how much of the community is affected by this liberty, compared to the liberty to drive at a normal safe speed that affects every single driver out there.

so. how easy is it to lump certain things into the nanny state bucket but not others?

Batfink, having received a letter from Centrelink, I can say there is a bit of a beat up. The system highlights a debt and asks for information to clarify within three weeks. If you provide the info then there is no problem. I can imagine some complex combinations of work and no work or no payment. I think some people don't like getting letters from government departments for whatever reason.

batfink, you are wrong on bike helmets and the brain. The physics is straight forward. The helmet material deforms which extends the time of the impact and so reduces the acceleration (v = u + at, where v is the final velocity, u is the initial velocity, a is acceleration and t is the time during which the acceleration occurred). The idea that this has no influence on the brain hitting in the inside of the skull is disproved by both simulations and statistics.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24005027
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2598379/

I think you are also under-estimating the cost of caring for a brain injured person over the rest of their life. Those who see this as a loss of freedom are only raising their perceived right to ride without a helmet over the much stronger right the rest of the community have to avoid unnecessary costs to the health system. This is the flaw in almost all nanny state/paternalistic arguments. They see the loss of their rights but not the consequential loss of the rights of others. All part of the me generation outlook I suppose.

Living next door to the Netherlands at the moment (literally a stones throw), and now, like everyone here (from my kids riding to school, to the 80+ year olds getting their shopping) spend a lot of time cycling. Most kids wear helmets - sometimes, but apart from that noone does. Good infrastructure and most of time bikes separated well from cars. Wanted to check some stats, and some quick googling shows this up between NL and AU.
In terms of head injuries per km:
Australia = 0.00051 head injuries per km ridden
Netherlands = 0.000052 head injuries per km ridden
Numbers crunched from here: http://www.cycle-helmets.com/netherlands-helmets.html

Australia has mandatory helmet laws yet has an order of magnitude higher head injuries per km ridden. There may be other factors at work such as good infrastructure, and good riding habits in the Netherlands, but not sure this would make up for an order of magnitude difference. Suggests to me that mandatory helmet laws don't achieve what they set out to (poor policy), and if they prevent riding, that is even worse.
Additionally, it is not policed at all in AU where I was before moving. Everyone would ride to beach for a surf, and police would happily wave to families and kids, all riding without helmets when heading down the beach...suggesting the law isnt really there for safety, but possibly more political than anything, particularly the increased NSW fines.

As far as bicycle safety goes, I don't think The Netherlands is a fair comparison. As well as having separated bicycle paths, isn't it just about the world's flattest country?

The Dutch population in general respect cyclists. Here, a large portion despise them.

Happy.... When u get stuck, you just cartwheel to another subject, like a cat hit by a car... So, we've left the bike helmet convo, which you don't wear , as you carry a 6 pack, but want bike helmet laws, , we quickly scarpered from that to zebra crossings, but now we'll bail on that one and jump onto lock out laws?
Can you honestly finish one conversation?

And didn't we cover the lock out laws? It's like a bizarre freakn loop..

Lost doggy... Perhaps lycra wearing cyclists in Holland aren't douch bags like the ones here that ride 4 abreast on a main road?

Never seen 4 abreast outside of a cycle event.
And yes I do find a lot of the Lycra wearing road dominators annoying. Doesn't explain why your general city commuter who is actually improving the traffic situation cops so much abuse.

ha ha SD. yeah its good isnt it. unfortunately message posts are a very difficult way of communicating effectively. and worse still trying to have a half real time discussion about complex topics.

but im still interested in you answering about liberties since it goes directly towards this whole discussion about the role of government. you clearly indicate that liberties can extend only so far and we still need rules. for example as roads become more congested and accidents increase then we lower speed limits as a reasonable way to address the problem. I hear no arguments from you and you seem quite agreeable to govt action in that respect. but when it comes to the govt trying to curb increasing alcohol fueled violence at 3am in the morning suddenly your barking about liberties. in both cases, innocent victims are involved. no-one deserves to spend a life in a mental institution with brain damage whether it be from a car accident or from a drunk prick.