In 2022, The Daily Beast reports, Adaptive Driving Beam (ADB) headlights for automobiles became legal in the United States — but still aren’t available because, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation says, conflicting National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulations make their implementation “practically impossible.”

ADB headlights arguably save lives in two ways:

First, they reduce the glare of oncoming high-beam headlights. If you’ve been driving for long, you’ve probably found yourself momentarily blinded when an approaching driver forgot to dim his lights. That’s dangerous.

Second, they provide adequate light in situations where a driver might not otherwise see a pedestrian or cyclist. According to the American Automobile Association, 77% of pedestrian deaths occur at night, and 64% of drivers don’t regularly use their high beams.

ADB headlights adapt to put the right amount of light in the right places — less light in an oncoming driver’s eyes, more light on a pedestrian crosswalk next to a burnt-out street light.

Even with instant approval, the long life of the average car means that ADB headlights would take years to completely supplant “traditional” headlights … and NHTSA pettifogging keeps pushing that time further and further out into the future.

As of 2022, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association, moving vehicles killed more than 7,500 pedestrians — more than 20 per day.

Not all of them at night, not all of them due to low visibility or improper headlight technique, of course, but let’s conservatively assume that widespread adoption of ADB headlight technology would knock the number down by 10%. That’s two lives per day, 730 per year, saved.

I suspect the impact would be much larger, but saving even 730 lives per year by GETTING OUT OF INNOVATION’S WAY seems like a better outcome than causing 730 unnecessary deaths per year by needlessly stalling.

Unfortunately, ABD headlights are far from the only innovation that gets caught up in the cycle of government approval:

1. Something’s invented that might make things better; but
2. The US government forbids its adoption; until
3. The US government allows its adoption, but only under arbitrary and irrational conditions; after years of fighting,
4. The US government finally allows its adoption; then
5. The US government requires its universal implementation without regard to whether producers or customers actually want it.

Steps 1 and 4 make your life better. They make you safer, healthier, and wealthier.

Steps 2, 3, and 5 negatively impact your life, your health, and your bottom line, no matter how much “for your own good” lecturing accompanies them.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Depending on whom you listen to about the constantly shifting horse race we call a US presidential election, either Joe Biden or Donald Trump is always ahead or behind by a nose … nationally. For example, a March 7-13 Ipsos/Reuters poll has Biden at 39% and Trump at 38%, while a March 10-12 Yougov/Economist poll shows Trump at 44% and Biden at 42%.

Among the many problems with national polling the single biggest one is that presidential elections aren’t national. Winning a state by one individual vote brings with it as many electoral votes as winning it by a million individual votes. It’s theoretically possible to win the presidency with only 23% of individual votes  cast nationwide. In practice, the differential between popular and electoral victory is never THAT wide, but it remains the case that national polling tells us little about the likely outcome.

Presidential elections almost always come down to a handful of states, and often to razor-thin margins in those states. In 2000, one state (Florida) and 537 individual votes (officially, anyway) settled the matter. The last two US presidential elections have been decided by less than 100,00 individual votes each in a few “swing” states.

Based on “solid,” “likely,” and “leaning” numbers, the site 270 To Win shows Joe Biden with 267 electoral votes pretty much in pocket, Trump with 219. Whoever hits 270 wins the election.

Unless something changes dramatically in the next eight months, which is quite possible, the election will be decided in four “toss-up” states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Biden can win the election with any one of them. Trump has to take all four.

There’s every chance that this election, like the previous two, will come down to a pool of voters ranging from “fairly large town” to “fairly small city” in size. It’s also quite possible that the winner will receive fewer votes nationwide than the winner.

If you’re thinking that doesn’t sound much like “democracy,” feel free to moan about the unfairness of the electoral college system. It won’t do you any good, but feel free anyway.

When you’re done moaning, consider this:

None of the candidates, nor anyone else, is qualified to rule “the United States,” or the people who live here.

That’s true regardless of HOW the ruler is chosen, and it doesn’t really matter much WHICH ruler is chosen.

Instead of worrying about who wins the presidency, we should be figuring out how to do away with the whole circus.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On March 13, the US House of Representatives passed HR 7521, the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.” The bill, which would attempt to ban the social media app TikTok unless its Chinese owners, ByteDance, sell it to non-Chinese owners, faces an uncertain future in the Senate, but president Joe Biden says he’ll sign it if it passes.

I don’t find the prospect of an attempt to ban TikTok unsettling, precisely because of the word “attempt.”

At present, only about 170 million Americans use TikTok. If this bill passes, that number is likely to go up, not down — and it’s likely to do so in ways that educate an entire new generation of Americans on how to find ways around the orders of their would-be masters in Washington.

There’s nothing new about that. Older Americans remember learning how to copy software, share music, encrypt files (and, later, currency), obtain marijuana, etc. when previous generations of politicians got the silly idea that they were in charge and could order us around.

None of that, however, exonerates the 352 Republican and Democratic members of Congress who voted for this idiotic, and patently unconstitutional, and irrefutably un-American, bill.

Under the guise of “protecting” Americans from the People’s Republic of China — one of the rotating cast members in a perpetual Enemy of the Week scam — those evil-doers unmasked themselves, most of them not for the first time, as clones of that country’s Communist Party apparatus.

Their “national security concerns” are risible, and their feigned concern for your privacy notably doesn’t extend to “protecting” you from surveillance by any or all of their own “alphabet soup” law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

The proposed TikTok ban isn’t about “national security,” nor is it about your privacy.

It’s about cultivating short-term moral panic for their political benefit.

It’s about establishing their longer-term control over anything and everything you might choose to do.

And it won’t take long to learn which  American Big Tech lobbyists and campaign contributors it was ALWAYS about giving an economic gift to.

The best way to respond to this attack on your rights is to install TikTok on your devices, start educating yourself on how to keep it there (or, if necessary, reinstall it) if the bill becomes law, and spread the word.

If you’re more politically inclined, you can find the roll call vote on the bill here …

https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/202486

… and vote accordingly in November.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY