It IS a nanny law. One could make the arguement that radios and eating are distractions. In fact i remember my grandmother saying there was a huge debate long ago about radios in cars and they almost banned it when they first started appearing in cars. Imagine if they had done that?

Typical McGimpy though. If it moves, ban it. If it doesn't, tax it.

Cant wait to kick this bum to the curb.

I would generally be opposed to a law such as this if Ontario Motorists (on the whole) had the ability to exercise good common sense to not constantly open themselves to distractions on the road.

While it is very far reaching, I fully expect this to be the type of law used to target careless drivers and I have absolutely ZERO problem with it.

once people start getting fined up their arse then they will get the point and stop txting away... The only thing i do is pull over to the side of the road and email only for work purposes. If i am at a stop light I do check my email. I don't think ppl should get fined for that. Has to be when your traveling more than 10 km/h .. ya never know though

useless law... most people don't abide it after a couple of years being applied here.

bleh.

As a driver who occasionally has to use his phone on the road, Great law! Well thought out and reasonable (seriously). Long overdue.

I drive to work three times per week and it's *really* annoying to drive behind someone using their phone or texting (it's really obvious too). In some cases it's quite dangerous.

The number of times I've nearly been hit as a pedestrian by someone talking on their phone making a turn at, or crossing an intersection without an all-way stop sign or light signal. Driving requires the drivers FULL attention - ALWAYS.

Nanny law? Common sense???!?!?! Really? Like regulation of complex derivative products? Ha! We should all regulate ourselves!!!1111!!!1111! Hahahahaha.










AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaahahahahahahah.




Get off your phone and pay attention to the god damned road!

Our company rule is that you do not use your phone when driving. If you need to make a call or return a call you are to pull off the road and do so.

quote:

Originally posted by DeleteFromUsers Really? Like regulation of complex derivative products? Ha! We should all regulate ourselves!!!1111!!!1111! Hahahahaha.

Rather unnecessary and false analogy.

quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut Rather unnecessary and false analogy.

Not at all. MANY things would work well if people could manage their own impulsive selfish nature. BUT WE OBVIOUSLY CAN'T... OBVIOUSLY.

So we have the law to keep people in line (approx.)

quote:

Originally posted by DeleteFromUsers Not at all. MANY things would work well if people could manage their own impulsive selfish nature. BUT WE OBVIOUSLY CAN'T... OBVIOUSLY. So we have the law to keep people in line (approx.)

You make it sound like they weren't regulated because the regulators thought that everybody would use them responsibly. The truth is that the regulators didn't even understand them, much less care, they only stepped in when they saw the damage it had already done, i.e. when it was already too late, and everybody else had already learned from their mistakes. So they get to say "oh look, the regulation is working", when what really happened was that the financials smartened up after facing catastrophic losses.

By contrast, Canada's financial industry froze the ABCP market without the need for any laws or government regulations. You could call it an industry regulation but that is effectively "self-regulation." So really, you picked one of the most ineffectual and ass-backwards examples to prove your misguided point.

Don't get me wrong, I actually fully agree with banning cell phone use in cars. Automobile drivers are in potentially life-threatening situations and the statistical data shows, unfortunately, that the majority of drivers consistently underestimate the risk involved with driving while using a cell phone or other interactive electronic device. To me, this is actually a subset of impaired judgment, similar to drunk driving. But this concerns the mouth-breathing hoi polloi, not intelligent and experienced industry professionals abundantly familiar with the risks they face every day.

Of course we need laws, and perhaps this law in particular, as well as enforcement (which we almost certainly won't have here, but oh well). I just think that your little "topical" reference was, as I pointed out above, both irrelevant and inappropriate.

quote:

Originally posted by exstasie That's what i'm thinking. Like if you have one of these, it should be okay.

as long as you arent trying to type in your destination while on the highway with the gps in your lap i think youll be just fine.

quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut [COLOR=#99CCEE]You make it sound like they weren't regulated because the regulators thought that everybody would use them responsibly. The truth is that the regulators didn't even understand them, much less care, they only stepped in when they saw the damage it had already done, i.e. when it was already too late, and everybody else had already learned from their mistakes. So they get to say "oh look, the regulation is working", when what really happened was that the financials smartened up after facing catastrophic losses. [COLOR]

You're saying investment banks have stopped using derivatives because they're too dangerous?

Doesn't look like that's the case. Looks like lobbyists are fighting to continue to use them unregulated!

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?...id=agFM_w6e2i00

In effect, it looks like my analogy was pretty much right on then. kthxbai

quote:

Originally posted by DeleteFromUsers You're saying investment banks have stopped using derivatives because they're too dangerous? Doesn't look like that's the case. Looks like lobbyists are fighting to continue to use them unregulated! http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?...id=agFM_w6e2i00 In effect, it looks like my analogy was pretty much right on then. kthxbai

I'm amazed at how you've managed to completely miss the point.

If your claim is that regulation of some activity is necessary or even beneficial, then it's not a sufficient argument to point to a disaster that "could have" been averted with the right rules, because that presumes that (a) the rule-makers had foreknowledge of the disaster, and (b) that the rules themselves don't alter the subjects' behaviour in unexpected ways, potentially causing a different (maybe bigger) disaster. Neither of these are true.

The canonical example of this is airport security. Every time there's some terrorist act or threat or other disaster, they analyze what happened and put in place new rules to prevent the same thing from happening again. But as we all know, it's a futile endeavour because the rules and therefore the loopholes are known (such as putting "Hotel America" for the destination, knowing that nobody will bother to check on it).

As a result, we end up with convoluted systems of seemingly pointless rules that make everybody's lives more difficult and do nothing to prevent the real problem that they are intended to prevent. And much of the time, the problems are actually exacerbated by other, politically-motivated rules ("no profiling") and the problems could be better solved by elimination of those rules, not the addition of new ones.

The fact that industry lobbyists are campaigning against potentially harmful regulations (I say potentially - I can admit to not knowing every detail about it) does absolutely nothing to prove your point or the legitimacy of your example. Most people who blame "derivatives" for every financial problem under the sun don't even really understand what a "derivative" is, what kinds of derivatives there are, how they work, or why they landed so many people into so much trouble. They just heard somewhere that "derivatives" were the problem and therefore must be regulated. They're the same people who blame "speculators" for price volatility, manage to push the speculators out of the market, and are surprised when the volatility triples. Now I'm not necessarily claiming that you're one of these, I don't know how educated you are, but so far you've done nothing to demonstrate that you understand the proposed regulations, or the root problem, or the reasons why many people think that the regulations are unnecessary or won't help or will cause more problems than they solve.

When it comes to distracted driving, we've got a good 40 years of research and volumes of statistics to identify behavioural patterns and key areas of risk, and even then, nobody is completely sure that laws like Bill 118 will solve the problem, we just think that they will. The anti-derivatives lobby has done none of this due diligence, it's all just a knee-jerk reaction to the financial crisis with no study of the long-term effects of regulation (notably the loss or degradation of a very important tool for investors to mitigate their risk). And as I've pointed out before, what little evidence we do have does not seem to be in their favour; other countries, like Canada, were able to prevent the same issues without "help" from the government.

If you're trying to argue that regulation is effective then you need a controlled test that takes into account people learning from their mistakes and circumventing the rules. In your derivatives example, you'd need to show that under the same economic conditions, companies or industries that were forced to follow some regulation did better than companies or industries that weren't, and you'd need to be able to show that you accounted for other fundamental differences. A before-and-after test is not valid evidence - and even if it were, we don't have one!

Now if you have any clue what you're talking about then please, feel free to explain instead of posting a tangential article and "kthxbai" retort. Otherwise we're forced to assume that you were just trying to sound smart.

quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut I'm amazed at how you've managed to completely miss the point. If your claim is that regulation of some activity is necessary or even beneficial, then it's not a sufficient argument to point to a disaster that "could have" been averted with the right rules, because that presumes that (a) the rule-makers had foreknowledge of the disaster, and (b) that the rules themselves don't alter the subjects' behaviour in unexpected ways, potentially causing a different (maybe bigger) disaster. Neither of these are true. The canonical example of this is airport security. Every time there's some terrorist act or threat or other disaster, they analyze what happened and put in place new rules to prevent the same thing from happening again. But as we all know, it's a futile endeavour because the rules and therefore the loopholes are known (such as putting "Hotel America" for the destination, knowing that nobody will bother to check on it). As a result, we end up with convoluted systems of seemingly pointless rules that make everybody's lives more difficult and do nothing to prevent the real problem that they are intended to prevent. And much of the time, the problems are actually exacerbated by other, politically-motivated rules ("no profiling") and the problems could be better solved by elimination of those rules, not the addition of new ones. The fact that industry lobbyists are campaigning against potentially harmful regulations (I say potentially - I can admit to not knowing every detail about it) does absolutely nothing to prove your point or the legitimacy of your example. Most people who blame "derivatives" for every financial problem under the sun don't even really understand what a "derivative" is, what kinds of derivatives there are, how they work, or why they landed so many people into so much trouble. They just heard somewhere that "derivatives" were the problem and therefore must be regulated. They're the same people who blame "speculators" for price volatility, manage to push the speculators out of the market, and are surprised when the volatility triples. Now I'm not necessarily claiming that you're one of these, I don't know how educated you are, but so far you've done nothing to demonstrate that you understand the proposed regulations, or the root problem, or the reasons why many people think that the regulations are unnecessary or won't help or will cause more problems than they solve. When it comes to distracted driving, we've got a good 40 years of research and volumes of statistics to identify behavioural patterns and key areas of risk, and even then, nobody is completely sure that laws like Bill 118 will solve the problem, we just think that they will. The anti-derivatives lobby has done none of this due diligence, it's all just a knee-jerk reaction to the financial crisis with no study of the long-term effects of regulation (notably the loss or degradation of a very important tool for investors to mitigate their risk). And as I've pointed out before, what little evidence we do have does not seem to be in their favour; other countries, like Canada, were able to prevent the same issues without "help" from the government. If you're trying to argue that regulation is effective then you need a controlled test that takes into account people learning from their mistakes and circumventing the rules. In your derivatives example, you'd need to show that under the same economic conditions, companies or industries that were forced to follow some regulation did better than companies or industries that weren't, and you'd need to be able to show that you accounted for other fundamental differences. A before-and-after test is not valid evidence - and even if it were, we don't have one! Now if you have any clue what you're talking about then please, feel free to explain instead of posting a tangential article and "kthxbai" retort. Otherwise we're forced to assume that you were just trying to sound smart.

Naturally the "kthxbai" thing is a trolling maneuver. Thanks for the half dozen paragraphs.

To boil down your retort, you're saying that you and I don't properly understand the issue (derivatives) and that those who are attempting to regulate them should make sure they know what they're doing (cause we don't). Well, that's true.

Honestly, I think my original point was well understood by most casual readers. Those interested in nit-picking casual banter on a casual web forum are perhaps more inclined to (in this order) appreciate the simple off-hand comment for the author's intent, then decide to flex some gray matter and and try to poke a wet finger through any possible holes in the comment. And here we are. Upon taking you to task after your original response, you have abandon your original intent (making me look like a dumb-ass, dumb-ass though I may actually be) and simply claim that neither of us have the appropriate knowledge to win the argument.

Well, I am at least as guilty as you. It takes two to make this happen and here I am on a Saturday night with a triple shot of Wild Turkey bourbon in front of my keyboard, sipping between paragraphs of a fruitless argument.

I surrender.

Haha, fair enough. What it really all comes down to is that an analogy is normally supposed to take a simple and well-known concept and use it to illuminate an obscure one, not the other way around. Somehow that point got lost in a discussion of derivatives and escalated into... this.

Sorry to everyone who slogged through that. Even though I was right.

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