Legal Drunk Drivers from the 1960s
Why Hacker News recommends it
Used as a historical analogy for public resistance to new safety rules, and as an amusing vox pop.
What it is
A 1967 current-affairs segment interviews habitual drunk drivers just before the UK introduced the breathalyser. They insist they drive fine after drinking.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2023 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Cites richbell · 2023-01 · on “Study Finds That Buttons in Cars Are Safer and Quicker to Use Than Touchscreens”
> The point is your opinion is concordant with every other poster in this thread, aka hivemind By this logic isn't everyone who is pro-touchscreens also a hivemind? > Nobody is asking whether some people are fine with touchscreens in cars and why that might be the case. Many people are demonstrably bad drivers who are over-confident in their ability and down-play the risk of distractions. When drunk driving was made illegal, people were furious and insisted they were fine to drive drunk and that it was perfectly safe: [this video] Touchscreens, while convenient and extensible, are demonstrably inferior to static physical controls for saftey-critical contexts.
Cites Levitz · 2023-03 · on “OpenAI CEO warns that GPT-4 could be misused for nefarious purposes”
The rise of the automobile did cause a whole lot of legal and social ramifications that ought to be a good warning. Drunk driving was legal for years, I think it's a good thing to be wary of how things can change and to be ready, as a society, to deal with unintended consequences of this new technology, even if we assume it to be a worthwhile net good. As an amusing tidbit: a reporter asking people about making drunk driving illegal, a little before that came to be a reality: [this video]
Cites Sevrene · 2025-12 · on “Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban”
>I feel like you haven't really been listening to the arguments against these types of age-verification-for-websites laws. Or maybe I just have a different conclusion to you? Because I do care, I do try to listen to the arguments. I'm no stranger to advocacy for civil liberties, they are important to me. I think all else being equal, freedom should be valued more over harm prevention. So if I'm for these laws, consider that a sign of how bad these sites have become, not how uninformed I am. > I mean, there's some similarities, of course. But I think there are some very stark differences. Yep of course it's not a 1:1, I agree. I don't mean to imply that people saying the same arguments today