{"id":45767,"date":"2018-03-28T22:24:48","date_gmt":"2018-03-29T02:24:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=45767"},"modified":"2020-08-05T22:28:04","modified_gmt":"2020-08-06T02:28:04","slug":"too-distracted-to-enforce-the-distracted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=45767","title":{"rendered":"Too distracted to enforce the distracted"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/span><\/p>\n

Georgia Senate approves House Bill 673<\/a>*, outlawing motorists from holding their cell phones while operating a vehicle AKA the stop fucking texting while driving bill.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

*behind paywall, but just hit the stop loading button before the paywall script popup has a chance to load to read content anyway because fuck myAJC<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s great and all, but it\u2019s going to be completely meaningless when no cop in the state is going to bother enforcing this law.\u00a0 Unless they\u2019re extremely bored and want to do work to pass the time and\/or they\u2019re targeting minorities.\u00a0 One of my best friends works in law enforcement, and every time I have questions about \u201cis X illegal?\u201d the answers are almost always yes, but with a disclaimer that it\u2019s basically discretionary on the officer to whether or not it\u2019s worth the effort to tie themselves up with menial violations when there are bigger fish to potentially<\/em> fry.<\/span><\/p>\n

And considering Georgia\u2019s lax discretionary ambivalence about HOV lane violators<\/a>, blackout license plate covers<\/a>, jaywalking<\/a>, and other seemingly innocuously negligible yet illegal misdemeanors, HB 673 seems destined to be as useless as most of these other laws, because if nobody\u2019s going to bother enforcing it, what\u2019s really the point?<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Believe you me, I would be stoked if this bill actually fully passes both the Senate and the House and actually becomes a legitimate law.\u00a0 It\u2019s not as bad as when I actively worked in the city, but still not too many car trips go by where I don\u2019t have to honk my horn, pass a slow-moving vehicle or unnecessarily brake, because some fuck face\u2019s face isn\u2019t watching the road but glued to whatever bullshit is on their cellphone\u2019s screen instead.\u00a0 It\u2019s so painfully obvious too when someone\u2019s been busted on their phones, because anyone with eyes can see a head snap up when they\u2019ve been honked at, as they put their phone down and then floor it, or you see a car going unnecessarily slow, because as their eyes fixate on a screen, their foot comes off the gas or worse off brake, because slowing down is justification enough to safely compensate for the risk of distraction.<\/span><\/p>\n

I would rather forfeit the OCD need to spin a Pok\u00e9stop or check a text message at a red light than to allow other people to be shitheads on the road.\u00a0 But I have 0% faith that the introduction of this bill would actually do anything.\u00a0 People are far too selfish shitheads to change shitty behavior, and as long as they believe no cops are around, they\u2019ll be all over their phones while driving, as they already are.\u00a0 And even if the police are in sight, I don\u2019t have much faith that they\u2019re going to bother pulling over people talking on their phones, because the fines don\u2019t be seem to get any higher than like $150, and that\u2019s for multiple violations, and they could much more easily justify their existence by busting the thousands of speeders throughout the state instead; if they even choose to do anything at all.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a good thought by the senate, but it\u2019s definitely one that has no chance of actually making an impact unless there\u2019s a 100% buy-in from all those who would be in charge of enforcing it.\u00a0 I know most cops deny the allegations of quotas, but honestly, would it be so bad if it were publicly known that there were?\u00a0 Bad behavior can\u2019t really be curbed unless the infractions are actively reinforced, and if a few people have to be made lambs to the slaughter in order to prevent a larger populous from thinking they can get away with it, then so be it; they\u2019re the ones doing illegal misdemeanor shit in the first place, someone should have to pay the price eventually.\u00a0 Far too many people are living their lives getting away with stupid shit on a far too frequent scale, and pretty much all of it needs to be scaled back to some more reasonable levels.<\/span><\/p>\n

Put your fucking phones down and get good at using Siri or Google Voice, and prepare for conversations of poorly speech-to-text composed messages instead, but at least be safer on the god damn roads.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Georgia Senate approves House Bill 673*, outlawing motorists from holding their cell phones while operating a vehicle AKA the stop fucking texting while driving bill. *behind paywall, but just hit the stop loading button before the paywall script popup has a chance to load to read content anyway because fuck myAJC That\u2019s great and all, … Continue reading Too distracted to enforce the distracted<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[51,79,112,45,8,52,25,10,146],"class_list":["post-45767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-cars","tag-cashmoney","tag-crime","tag-fail","tag-ohgeorgia","tag-owned","tag-technology","tag-traffic","tag-triggered"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45767"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45769,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45767\/revisions\/45769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}