Wednesday, October 25, 2017

smartphone heads-up

And, in an effort to slow the irreversible trend towards idiocy:
Our smartphone obsession has reached a new low. The Hawaiian city of Honolulu has resorted to fining people up to $99 for staring at the devices, to try and force people to look up from their phones while crossing the road.
The new law gives police the power to fine people up to $35 (£26.41) for their first offence, $75 for their second and $99 thereafter, perhaps expecting it to take quite some effort to get people to take notice....
Other cities have tried physical adjustments in an effort to change pedestrians’ behaviour. London’s Brick Lane installed padded lampposts in 2008 to help those walking into them while texting. Last year, the German city of Augsburg went as far as embedding traffic signals into the ground near tram tracks.

3 comments:

  1. I remember when you only walked into lamp poles because you were lost in thought. Kids these days can't do that. They need training wheels to get those bruises.

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  2. Yeah.... I guess the Honolulu government is trying to raise the profile of the issue in the interest of public safety and, at the same time, raise some cash. Since research clearly shows there’s no guarantees about the former goal, we can infer the true intention is to generate a grand or so a day amounts. LOL!

    Harkening back to an earlier post of criminalizing stupidity, lets nominate the creators of smartphones for a Darwin Award*.

    :-)’

    *”The Darwin Awards are a tongue-in-cheek honor, originating in Usenet newsgroup discussions around 1985. They recognize individuals who have supposedly contributed to human evolution by selecting themselves out of the gene pool via death or sterilization by their own actions.”
    From Darwin Awards - Wikipedia
    See http://www.darwinawards.com/.

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    1. Evidently, the operator of Blogspot, Google, has decided not to permit commenters to link to web sites anymore. I undertook a cursory search and it did not revealed the reason for the change or even acknowledge the change except indirectly. Posters can only link to sites using “https”.
      .

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