I am not an expert on car safety standards in either US or EU. Nitpicking this quote: “ Europe currently has mandatory requirements for life-saving technologies, such as pedestrian protection, automated emergency braking and lane-keeping assistance”
My cheap, Chevy Trax has some of these features. Lane keeping assistance is there. It will tell me if there is a pedestrian in front of me. If it sees someone’s brake lights then it will flash a red light on the windshield to warn me that I am too close.
It doesn’t have emergency braking but my Wife’s 2019 Honda Odyssey had all those things except the pedestrian protection. All US vehicles.
What standards are we really talking about?
This is one of these articles that feels more like clickbait and judging on the emotional responses I see in this comment section it worked. The top comment is railing against Dodge Rams which wasn’t mentioned in the article.
One of these features is "Active Hood" or "Pop Up Hood" which uses pyrotechnic to pop the hood of the car in case of a frontal collision with a pedestrian, thus making the front hood of the car acting as some kind of stiff airbag for the pedestrian. This helps reducing the risk of life-threatening injuries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4zfwUL3joI
That’s why the US vehicles focus on occupant safety since the US does not have a pedestrian centric culture - it is now built around cars. Some places in small pockets are trying to change that but it’s slow and unlikely to be widespread. Other roadway safety features for pedestrians by cities or counties have been enacted. But these lessons are learned in blood. Recently there was a case a couple years ago in a beach town in Florida where a girl died crossing A1A. That town put in a bunch of safety devices after aggressively lobbying the State. But the vehicles weren’t modified.
The US, at least at the state level, has often adopted standards far earlier than Europe. Seat belts, the latch system (called ISOFix in Europe) for car seats, and airbags come to mind.
Agreed that this feels like click/rage bait mostly against US pickup trucks, which many people in the States express frustration with too!
>EU vehicle safety regulations have supported a 36% reduction in European road deaths since 2010. By contrast, road deaths in the US over the same period increased 30%, with pedestrian deaths up 80% and cyclist deaths up 50%
There might be something in those stats other than anecdotal vibes.
How do we really know that? If people walk more and drive less one could argue that road deaths go down too. US has a lot more cars and roads than EU. And we have this massive Interstate system.
Have you verified your numbers? With some basic searching I found that the amount of cars registered in the EU seems to be comparable (if not slightly more than) than the USA, while the total length of public roads in the USA is about 10% more than that one of the EU. Keep in mind that in the EU you have a lot of European routes which can stretch vast amount of distances over several countries, similar to the US' interstate system.
The biggest factor I can think of is the lack of sidewalks and bike lanes in the US on many roads, additionally there's a disregard of bicyclists by car users, which negatively encourages these two to be as prevalent on the roads as compared to in the EU, since everyone is incentivized to just get a car anyway.
You might want to double check your own numbers.
EU having “comparable or slightly more” cars than the US depends entirely on whether you count the EU as a single bloc or as individual nations. Per capita car ownership is still higher in the US. Road length is also not the relevant metric. What matters is road design, lane width, speed environment, lighting, and pedestrian exposure.
Pointing to “a lot of European routes” does not explain why US pedestrian deaths climbed 80 percent in 15 years while EU rates fell. Road geometry, car size, and enforcement patterns do.
Sidewalks and bike lanes are part of the story but not the whole story.
If we are trading verification requests, the burden applies both ways.
You are mixing up “Devils advocate” with “prove the negative for me.”
The point of Devils advocate is to test assumptions, not to accept the first correlation as gospel.
If pedestrian and cyclist deaths rise 80% and 50% while vehicle size, road design, lighting, speeding, and impairment trends also shift, then asking whether those factors matter is not “sowing doubt.” It is literally how causal analysis works.
If your position is that questioning causality is illegitimate unless I hand you a fully formed alternative theory, then you are not defending evidence. You are defending certainty.
nope, and arguing the point was anticipated. You've still not presented anything.
You're free to suggest an alternative concept, and that would be discussed because this is a forum, and not a place to play transparent political games.
We use it work to do things on WSL2 in Azure Desktop that don’t require a Linux VM and using Windows versions of tools that feel clunky like helm, kubectl, etc. We can easily interface with ACR and AKS this way.
I guess you're familiar with those resources since you're claiming those mention Microsoft's approach to protecting freedom of expression and user privacy in Saudi Arabia. Could you please be kind and provide direct links to that/those page(s)? I opened and read through the links, but probably it's in some sub-page? Didn't manage to find anything about it.
Every step along the way, Microsoft picks "key" areas/terms/subjects, so they're only covering a few human rights that they convinced themselves are most important. Within each covered item, you'll find a couple of paragraphs that explain why complying can be problematic if they want to make more money, and a few lines of manager speak and links to "projects" and "partnerships" that vaguely promise to accomplish vague goals on a vague timeline with no mention of what happens if they fail their goals.
Countries and specific risks are not named. Microsoft may as well be helping Netanyahu organize optimal genocide directly and they'll still be able to barf up some manager speak to explain why they're trying real hard, honest!
Their statements are full of talk like:
> Our commitment to the rule of law
carries with it the legal obligation to comply with applicable local law. When we face requests from governments to provide user data or remove content, we work to respect the rights to privacy and freedom of expression by assessing whether the government requests are valid, legally binding, compliant with applicable law, and consistent with international laws, principles, and norms on human rights and the rule of law.
(in other words: they'll just ask legal if they should comply with government requests and that's supposed to protect your freedom of speech)
And gems like:
> The GNI Board concluded that we met our commitment to GNI to make
“good-faith efforts to implement the
GNI Principles with improvement over
time.
(in other words: we've managed to convince the GNI board that we really care)
In 2016 Saudi Arabia was armed to the teeth by the Trump (Administration #1) to launch a huge multibillion invasion of the Yemen, bombing, cutting off food supplies, as a tactic of war, causing a famine which left over 370k people dead.
In addition the Saudi's Armed the gnocidal Jajaweed/RSF (again with US weaponry) to fight in Yemen, the same RSF who have now creating mayhem and collapse in the Sudan.
The question is, given these encyclopaedic statements about corporate responsibility, for what exactly do they count for? when Microsoft is happy to engage with this regime which:
which arms and supplies a group known to practice mass genocide/ janjaweed /rsf sponsored by Saudis
* a government which practices mass starvation and invasions of it neighbour
* is know for torturing and dismembering dissidents alive
To answer your question, the links mean that it has achieved compliance with the laws of the governments of the other countries it operates in, no more than that.
Your geopolitical insinuation is interestingly monofaceted, however. Ignoring the many domestic pressures at the time which are relevant (such as vote share in arms-producing districts), the 2016 action by the US (1) acted as a small hedge against any gains in regional power by China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Oman, Russia, Turkey or the United Kingdom (such as market share or diplomatic point-scoring) while (2) simultaneously implying to MBS that, in the short term (2-5 years), he was on his own with respect to Iran and (3) moderately reinforcing the carefully cultivated political aesthetic of U.S. impulsivity and violence.
All three of those modest goals were achieved and were later undermined by unforced errors elsewhere. Alternatively, one could consider that those goals were achieved to build up a reserve of political capital that could be expended to permit the unforced errors elsewhere.
This is a false equivalence. The United States was not trying to “conquer” those countries in the territorial sense that Russia attempted with Ukraine. Those conflicts were limited political or counterinsurgency objectives fought under strict constraints, often without public support, and with no intention of annexation. Comparing that to a conventional invasion aimed at seizing and absorbing a neighbor’s territory is analytically inaccurate.
US did defeat Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. And indirectly Syria by supporting the insurgency (and we had bases in that Country). It is also worth noting that the US and South Vietnam had effectively contained the North by 1973. The Paris Peace Accords ended direct US involvement and the North violated those terms two years later when it launched a full-scale conventional invasion. South Vietnam collapsed only after the US withdrew military support. Same with Afghanistan. Iraq is flourishing without Saddam and without war. It toppled Saddam’s regime in weeks, and the country now has an elected government, functioning institutions, and no US occupation. Whatever its internal challenges, Iraq is not a case where the US attempted and failed to annex territory. It demonstrates that these were limited political interventions, not conquest wars.
(I'm not sure how many Vietnamese actually love USA, vs how many don't... I just want to remind that different people in the same society might hold different opinions, and the sentiment is certainly not monolithic)
Vietnam had such massive population growth that there are very few people who even remember the war. On the other hand China was pretty much always ingrained into their “national consciousness” as a permanent massive threat.
I never really looked into it, but it looks like the vast majority of Vietnamese were born after the war so US culture and trade are way more important contributors to opinion. Vietnamese are some of the most pro-US people in the world.
The correlation is backwards. America’s mid-20th-century dominance was not the result of having only about 10 percent college graduates. It came from unique post–World War II advantages: intact industrial capacity, massive federal investment like the GI Bill, NSF, DARPA, and the interstate highway system, and the fact that global competitors were rebuilding from destruction. The GI Bill greatly expanded access to higher education and economists widely credit it with boosting productivity, innovation, and the growth of the middle class. Rising college attainment in the 1990s and 2000s coincides with globalization, offshoring, and wage stagnation, which makes this a correlation problem rather than evidence that more education causes national decline.
It was 10% of the US population who went to college before the GI bill, which then doubled to 20% over a decade following the war. Now >50% have post secondary. 70% attempt post-secondary after high school
Before WW2 only about 40% of people completed high school, now it’s at 90%
Those numbers actually back up the point. The jump in education after WWII happened during the biggest boom years the US ever had. The rise to 40 percent college grads happened much later, during globalization and offshoring. So the slowdown is about the economy changing, not people getting more education. It is just a bad correlation.
Right, there was clearly much more capacity for advanced education with the rise of technology (farming advancements, medicine, electronics etc) that started before WW2
There is something to the point about needing a correction in post secondary education and making university again a specialized place rather than the catch all default generalized institutions. Where 70% of the population tries to waits 3-5yrs+ to enter the workforce in exchange for lots of debt. A debt heavily incentivized by cheap gov backed loans, subsidies, credential inflation, and very profitable immigration schemes.
Sure, there are real issues with cost, debt, and credential creep, but that does not change the basic point: the expansion of education itself was a net positive for decades. The problems we have now come from financing, policy choices, and a labor market that shifted under globalization. Blaming education levels for broader economic or social trends just mixes up the cause and effect.
Agree; there is little evidence these simulators did much beyond occupy people’s time for a while. I remember around 2022 in my Systems Engineering Masters someone wrote a similar simulator. I suppose it was inspired by this. It was a simulator that tried to simulate how infection spread in a cubicle setting.
There is one positive thing despite RTO becoming a thing and that is remote work became more recognized even if its trending more hybrid.
SonaType Lifecycle has some magic to prevent these types of attacks. They claim it is AI based. Not sure how it all works as it is proprietary but it is one of the things we use at work. SonaType IQ server powers it
My cheap, Chevy Trax has some of these features. Lane keeping assistance is there. It will tell me if there is a pedestrian in front of me. If it sees someone’s brake lights then it will flash a red light on the windshield to warn me that I am too close.
It doesn’t have emergency braking but my Wife’s 2019 Honda Odyssey had all those things except the pedestrian protection. All US vehicles.
What standards are we really talking about?
This is one of these articles that feels more like clickbait and judging on the emotional responses I see in this comment section it worked. The top comment is railing against Dodge Rams which wasn’t mentioned in the article.
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