<snip>

With things like this, I say, "Let Darwin rule."  Full stop.

I draw the line at things where (a) children have to be protected from
idiot parents (so I support car seat laws but not seat belt laws) and
(b) where there is a significant public risk to the behavior (such as
using a cell phone while driving).  Other than that, one should be free
to be as stupid as one wishes after reaching the age of majority.

Law or no law, you'd never get me to ride a bike (motorized or not)
without a helmet or drive or ride in a car without a seat belt.

JRE

Floyd

Didn't make any difference in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England.

85% of the kids are home grown idiots.  this is mainly because it being a Navy
base and after the war (WW2) many of the men folk never returned and they
shifted many of the single mums out to a "new town" not far away.

The sailors came into port and went to find the girls and then the single mums
had 2 or 3 kids - no dad.  The guy met another girl around the corner on the
next visit and she ended up with another kid - same dad.

Eventually over the past 60 years we have brothers marrying sisters and not
knowing............. They call it in-breeding and like racehorses they either
excel (not often) or fall at the first fence (most often).

Nothing at all to do with lead in petrol - in fact light aircraft still use
leaded fuel and so do all those still using petrol piston engines like the
racers and antiques........

Must agree with you on that - they are all f.cking loons

Yes!  Lord Cornwallis was a dim witted twit ---------- best thing you ever did
to get the British out but-------- unfortunately you never learned how to cope
with change.

I feel so dismayed when I see movies showing the skylines of your great cities
and then think ---- why didn't they modernize the docks?  Why does it look so
drab everywhere else except for the tourist areas?

Yes London has some sh.t - I know I was born in South London but they have
really cleaned the place up and what was the grubby dockland area is now chic
expensive homes and a really nice place to be.  One can walk round the area just
for the sake of doing it and not to actually go somewhere.

Really?  Doesn't appear that way when I visit the Southern area.  Look at the
floods in New Orleans - what we saw was thousands of poor black skinned American
loosing everything but not many white skinned folk in view????

So let's call a truce?  What do you say?

I say tom-ar-too  you say tom-A-too

There are all sorts of 'what ifs' about both seatbelts and airbags. But
if you ask those who have to deal with the aftermath of road smashes
*both* have reduced serious injury and deaths. With seatbelts being by far
the more important of the two.

The one proviso appears to be with small children in the front of the car
who aren't belted in. However, these should be in the back in the correct
seats anyway.

UK airbags are smaller than American airbags because they work in
conjunction with the seat belts.  Americans dont wear seta belts so their
airbags are bigger to compensate. Even with the bigger airbags it is still
better to wear the seatbelts. Safer

That is not true.  In fact, most seatbelt systems *IN NEWEW CARS*
will inflate (explode) with more force if it detects that the seat belt
is not in use but someone is in the seat (smart airbag system).  NHTSA
finally recognized that airbags themselves were causing injuries.

However, in the front passenger seat position the airbag can in some
cases be disabled to provide for the case where an infant seat is
placed there, because it's inflation could kill the backwards-facing infant.
This is a requirement in vehicles that have no back seats (trucks in
particular, although it catches Boxsters and such, too.)

I'm sure that these facts are somewhere on the NHTSA website,
but like all govt stuff it's hard to actually find what you want.

FloydR

That is at least true of the first generation of airbags.  They were
intended to restrain a *170*- pound unbelted individual.  The second
generation belts as installed in my Jaguar have a low-power trigger
for a light individual sitting in the front passenger seat and I
believe it fires whether there is a belt in use or not - as long as it
detectes weight on the seat.

Not if the seat is occupied.  The only airbag system conditions I know
of that disable the bag are those that detect the seat is *unoccupied*
(in which case you can save the cost of a needlessly fired airbag in a
collision) or where it is manually switched because of a special
condition (a two-seat vehicle with the need to carry an infant or
child seat in front - like the Miata-driving chicks who 'suddenly' end
up as single parents).
--
C.R. Krieger
Been there; done that