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From: bennet@gymble.UUCP (Tom Bennet)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: If you could save lives, would you ?
Message-ID: <314@gymble.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 5-Sep-85 20:34:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: gymble.314
Posted: Thu Sep  5 20:34:12 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 8-Sep-85 09:46:34 EDT
Distribution: net
Organization: U of Maryland, Laboratory for Parallel Computation, C.P., MD
Lines: 38

>From jad@harpo.UUCP (jad) Wed Sep  4 16:32:11 1985
>Message-ID: <2776@harpo.UUCP>
>
>  If you had the power to save lives, would you do it? You and I do have that
>  power. On this day and at this moment, people are being smashed to death    
>  inside their cars when their lives could be preserved by air bags. 

Their lives could also be preserved if they would wear their seat belts, a
far cheaper system.

>  We are
>  deprived of air bags by the opposing efforts of the powerful auto industry.
>  Safety experts claim that each year air bags would prevent thousands of     
>  deaths and prevent hundreds of thousands of serious injuries. ...No endeavor
>  is more important nor more noble
>  than to save lives.
>  

Well, I'm not a part of the auto industry, but I for one am just as happy to be
deprived of air bags rather than have to pay for them.  If the auto industry
were required to offer them as options, at their actual cost, that would be
okay.

The argument about whether bags are actually cheaper for liablity reasons or
whether you can just limit liability when a person is not wearing belts has
already been considered at length in this group, but the real point is simply
this: why should I expend a lot of energy to save people who won't take step 1
to save themselves?  I'm happy to help someone try, but these people aren't
trying.
-- 
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"That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us ... that the secret point
of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor
power for power's sake ..., but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy."
						-- Joan Didion
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Tom Bennet @ U of MD Comp Sci Dept    |   ..!ihnp4!seismo!umcp-cs!gymble!bennet
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