Aiming to kill pedestrians

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ccgr
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... ina_s.html


What a sad state this world is in when life is no longer priceless ;(
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You know, I've gotta ask the question: What could be done by the government to change this?

The article says that the primary motivation is financial, since it costs less to compensate the family for a death than to provide treatment for the rest of the victim's life.

So as I see it, there's a few major options.


1): Change it to be a universal flat fee, so that regardless of death or injury, the driver pays the same amount. This removes the temptation to abuse the system (as we sadly see here), but does leave the possibility open that the victim will not be compensated enough, or will be compensated too much (For instance, if they walk away with minor injuries).

2): Make both flat fees, with a higher flat fee for death. This definitely discourages killing the victim, but does leave open the possibility mentioned above about the victim not being covered enough.

3): Add a definite penalty of prison time when the victim is killed. This does lend itself to imprisonment when the victim was genuinely killed by accident and the driver perhaps does not deserve prison.

4): Change the way insurance is handled. This is a very complex issue that perhaps becomes an impossibility with the way China operates, but it's worth bringing up nonetheless.


This situation is definitely sad, but one also has to wonder how to change the situation to make it less viable to kill pedestrians. This is one area where I think we in the U.S. do a pretty decent job (You can get charged with manslaughter, and can go to jail or face severe penalties if it was deemed accidental). This kind of thing would almost certainly count as murder or willful manslaughter here in the states, as well as most of the developed world.
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This is where I say that "advanced" civilization's governments DO NOT CARE about human life. I read something somewhere once, that all the little things our government has legalized is actually in at least a small way, population control; preparing for the inevitable future of overpopulation.

China is huge. And I mean HUGE. Everyone has heard of their laws on procreating. Their government from what I can see, has zero regard for human life, because they will always have over a billion people within their borders. Am I making sense?
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oregorn1997 wrote:This is where I say that "advanced" civilization's governments DO NOT CARE about human life. I read something somewhere once, that all the little things our government has legalized is actually in at least a small way, population control; preparing for the inevitable future of overpopulation.

China is huge. And I mean HUGE. Everyone has heard of their laws on procreating. Their government from what I can see, has zero regard for human life, because they will always have over a billion people within their borders. Am I making sense?

I was thinking the same thing. Human life is breathtakingly devalued in that part of the world for exactly the reason of overpopulation. I see this issue as a symptom of that attitude. I don't see anything changing unless something happens to restore the value of individual lives over there.
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Honestly, our shock to this is probably above all, a testament to how far we've come. It's not historically common for people to care about people who weren't their own.
But despite all we've seen in the media, we're actually at an all time low when it comes to deaths in war and combat, crime is drastically down, and we have European nations (sans Hungary) opening their door to Syrian migrants.
oregorn1997 wrote:This is where I say that "advanced" civilization's governments DO NOT CARE about human life.
I'd draw a drastically different line from a "advanced civilization" government like the German democracy which is dropping 6 billion dollars worth of aid for syrian migrants from the PRC which has, probably for the life of it's self, just not cared much for it's own people.

Unchecked cynicism is just as intellectually lazy as unchecked optimism; it's just comes off as more passably "mature." Don't take this as insult pointed at you; it's not. It's just an easy trap to fall in. We see much around the world, more than anybody has in history and we need to make mental reorientations to account for the bias toward negative news. Frankly, the more unlikely a catastrophe is, the more likely it is to be reported on, and our brains are already wired to remember bad things more.
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