Steve Litt via Talk wrote on 2026-05-20 22:21:
A great analogy is automobile air-bags. Air bags are dangerous and
injure people in 20MPH collisions because the powers that be specified
putting in so much explosive as to protect a person not wearing a seat
belt. It's the deliberate detriment of responsible folks to accommodate
those who don't want to bother at all.

I see your point now:

To provide crash protection for occupants not wearing seat belts, United States airbag designs trigger much more forcefully than airbags designed to the international ECE standards used in most other countries.
You're right, they seem to have been overly aggressive to protect idiots not wearing seat belts.


However, wasn't it was dealt with for the most part in the 1990s?

TRW produced the first gas-inflated airbag in 1994, with sensors and low inflation-force bags becoming common soon afterward. Dual-depth (also known as dual-stage) airbags appeared on passenger cars in 1998. By 2005, deaths related to airbags had declined, with no adult deaths and two child deaths attributed to airbags that year. However, injuries remain fairly common in collisions with airbag deployment.


I still reject the notion that airbags are a great analogy to some "destruction of DIY" to "attract people who probably won't use Linux anyway, and if they tried, are unwilling to edit a file or use Google".

Sounds like your usual anti-systemd rhetoric, which has nothing to do with attracting Windows users, and makes impossible things pretty easy for sysadmins.