You know it's totally feasible to make a car that won't turn on for drunk people. Should those systems be installed on all cars, in pursuit of creating systems that don't permit stupid actions?
Maybe such a breathalyzer interlock could be installed on your workstation too. After all, your systems and processes should prevent you from stupid things.
Replace a breathalyzer with something that's less intruisive (like a camera with AI that would observe the person, AI with thermal imaging or air quality sensors, or another possibly-fictional-yet-believable piece of technology) and suddenly, in my eyes, the technology in this thought experiment becomes a no brainer.
If there was more of a cultural pressure against drunk driving and actual mechanisms to prevent it that aren't too difficult to maintain and utilize, things like the Daikou services ( https://www.quora.com/How-effective-is-the-Japanese-daikou-s... ) would pop up and take care of the other logistical problems of getting your car home. And the world would be all the better for it, because of less drunk driving and accidents.
Don’t be absurd. Of course there are costs and tradeoffs to guardrails, and you have to balance the tradeoffs based on your requirements.
This person had to publicly apologize to their customers. One or two low-cost guardrails could have prevented it and would probably have been worth the cost.
Is that absurd? Systems should prevent mistakes, unless the part needed to implement that is a hundred dollars or so? That seems like quite the walk-back. Courts order alcoholics to install these things, they're established available technology. What tradeoffs are you balancing here?
It will be a great idea when the reliability of the system will have a large number of nines, so chances that you are stranded in the middle of nowhere and the car does not want to start because of a fault will be less than being hit by an asteroid. Other than that, people would consider it an unsafe product and refuse to use it and people vote for what finally becomes a law.
I heard the same argument for electronic gun safety measures, except that no government agency even consider using it for their own guns. Why? They are not reliable enough, yet.
Or a blog on being unable to drive your kid to an emergency room because you just finished a glass of wine over dinner.
A problem with devices of that type is that they only test for a potentialsource of inability to drive safely. What we want is to test for an inability to drive safely.
And while one is easy and might give some quick wins, the drawbacks scare me too much.
Being unable to take your car when your child needs to go to the ER would be terrible.
Actually getting in the car while under the influence such of stress and alcohol sounds worse.
I know someone who had a glass of wine just before her daughter needed to be brought to the hospital. This was just two days ago. She simply concluded she could not drive. Luckily, she was able to get a taxi.
Maybe we should, as a society, invest in taxis equipped with medical facilities and trained personnel so that they can provide first response medical treatment while on the way to the ER.
I'm sure that would save a lot of lives. An ambulatory medical service, if you will.
Sometimes ambulances are occupied and taking a taxi goes faster. Especially if it's something which isn't immediately life threatening.
I once dislocated my shoulder while on a large trampoline and was unable to get up from my hands and knees due to the intense pain whenever the trampoline wobbled. The ambulance was redirected to more serious injuries three times. I was stuck in that position waiting for two hours before it arrived.
Yes. I was answering a comment suggesting the use of an ambulance (instead of a regular taxi). Simply pointing out that, in practice, there are times when a taxi can get you there faster.
In that scenario it would also be appropriate to wait for a driver to sober up before driving you to the hospital if neither ambulance nor taxi were available (or delayed). One glass of wine would be out of most people's systems after two hours.
Thus poking hole in the "drunk drive someone to the hospital" argument, which is what this was all about in the first place.
I did argue, in my original comment, that drunk driving should not be an option. I certainly stand by that. My original comment also mentioned a taxi, to which you replied about ambulances.
In my previous comment I just meant that sometimes ambulances can take a good while and a taxi might not.
In the unfortunate case of the trampoline there were several sober people with driver's license and cars available and a taxi would have been there immediately.
Unfortunately,they failed to get me out of there, meaning I still had to wait until an ambulance was available. It was beyond painful and exhausting both physically and mentally. But it was still technically not an emergency.
Note that ambulance ride (depending on insurance) may cost an order or 2 of magnitude more than the taxi. Well worth it in some circumstances - but not always the best option.
This didn't spring to my mind as I'm Swedish and here it's less than a taxi and any medical costs beyond the first USD $130 per year is covered by the free health insurance.
You are still simply going with one glass of wine will affect everyone equally, and that is proven to be untrue. (Or stress, for that matter)
While your friend made a call judging their own abilities and the level of emergency, that's exactly how it should be: cars should not stop us humans for making that decision.
(Fwiw, if you were just having an alcoholic drink, a breathalizer would show a much higher concentration even though alcohol might not have even kicked in or there wasn't enough for it to kivk in at all)
There was a funny story recently in the UK, where a football team was late for a match because their breathalyser-equipped team bus refused to start. Turns out it wasn’t that the driver had been drinking, rather that the alcohol-based disinfectant they’d used to clean the bus triggered it.
Maybe such a breathalyzer interlock could be installed on your workstation too. After all, your systems and processes should prevent you from stupid things.