Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

This makes me wonder if anyone's POV on seatbelts or masks also reflect their political leanings. I could be completely wrong. Seems to me that those who do not agree with the mask mandates quite possibly lean more toward the libertarian view of, the government should have little to no interference in our daily lives whereas those who think the government should be able to mandate masks/seatbelts or anything else would lean more towards a political view that the government should play a much larger role.

But I also believe that there are those that also fall in between either category. It's a fine line to consider. This really could be applied to a litany of issues, up to and including pro-life/pro-choice.

FFS if you people start debating abortion here I'm going to come to your houses and hit you with a stick. A medium sized stick.

Did you check the safety ratings on the stick first?

The last time I bought a car was 2005 when we were expecting to start a family soon, so we did check the safety ratings. It didn't influence which make or model of car I bought, but it did influence which trim I got (deluxe trim had side airbags and a bunch of other stuff I wanted).

Safety ratings influence insurance costs, and I never buy a car without considering that as part of the total cost to own it. I happen to drive one of the safest, but that was kind of a bonus more than anything, because most are pretty good. As someone else mentioned, it's those that have a particular vulnerability (usually front-corner crashes) that you really have to worry about.

Our last dance at car-hunting was 2012, and no, I can't say I ever looked closely at any safety ratings. We looked at gas mileage, does it have seat-belts, recalls, reviews...etc.

At the time we were locked into a GM product because having worked there in the past I had an employee discount to use, and we knew we wanted a mid-size SUV with two tiny people to take road trips with, so we more or less knew what we wanted.

Here we are 8 years later I just looked it up, and the Equinox gets good grades all around.

More or less what Bakeman said above. As long as it's not a Yugo, is there really that much difference in 2020? I don't know.

A lot of popular vehicles have lousy safety ratings so someone is buying them. Not sure how much a difference it makes overall. Except when it does I suppose.

https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-model

https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/driver-death-rates-remain-high-among-small-cars

And death rates by vehicle can be influenced by other factors. Some vehicles are more likely to be driven by people who speed/drive aggressively which can impact death rates.

You mean like people who would drive a spirts car a little too fast while not using the seat belt? Are there really people who do that?

—Dave Althoff, Jr.

I've never looked at the safety rating of a vehicle before I bought it. I've only bought old cars so usually if a model is a death trap that becomes common knowledge long before I would be likely to buy it. I have always just gone with bigger is better and so far both times I've been in accidents the other vehicle fared worse than mine so that has worked well enough on my end.

Here's another round-up of studies that suggest that early restriction lifting has had a negative effect on infection rates. Of course, these are always hard experiments to design, since you can't actually have a control group with a universe that did not have the lifted restrictions.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/10/us-states-stopped-their-pan...-too-soon/

Man did I miss some fun conversation while I was on vacay.

1. I'm with Gonch on the seatbelt thing. Only difference is that I wear mine. I don't care whether you wear one or not. I don't see a need for a law requiring it, and the thought of getting hit with a fine because I didn't strap myself into my car seems dumb. The government is not intended to protect ourselves from ourselves (mostly speaking individualistically here).

2. Re: car safety ratings. I might look at them, but don't tend to base a car purchase on them. Additionally, larger doesn't always mean safer, and, obviously, smaller doesn't always mean less safe. There have been times where having a small vehicle has actually saved my ass. I drove a '91 Miata for 4 years and it was the best (and most fun) car I ever owned. On one particular incident, I rounded a blind curve at speed and found a line of traffic stopped in front of me. The next events all occurred within about 3 seconds: while slamming on my brakes (not enough to lock the wheels so I didn't start skidding), I realized my super light car would rather easily stop within a few feet from the stopped minivan in front of me. While braking, I checked the rear view mirror and saw a pickup behind me not slowing quickly enough. I made a split-second decision to ease up on the brakes and jerk the wheel to the right which neatly placed me on the shoulder next to the minivan, and then the pickup came to a stop within 2 feet of the minivan's rear bumper, which would have created a Vater sandwich had I not swerved. My other vehicle at the time was a '99 Explorer, and had I been driving that, there is no way on Earth it was nimble enough to avoid the minivan, nor the truck behind it. Yes, I likely would have survived and possibly not been hurt, but avoiding the wreck altogether was a far preferable outcome. And yes I'm aware I may have not had the presence of mind to pull such a maneuver in the Miata had I waited a fraction of a second too long, but when you drive a small vehicle like that, you tend to be much more aware when you're driving.

It's all a gamble anyway some of us will be magnets for other cars and some of us will never even get s scuff on any of our vehicles just because we were always in the right place at the right time so you need to go with what meets your needs and what you enjoy driving. I happened to very early on find I love the way a full size, rear wheel drive boat sails down the road so that is what I stuck with until recently. It's been an adjustment.

Seatbelts: It's been scientifically proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that seatbelts work. And that airbags *only* work in tandem with seatbelts. If Gonch doesn't want to wear one, that's his business. However, I once called the police on a minivan at a stoplight that had 2 kids jumping around in the cargo area. For that I offer ZERO apologies because F that parent.

As for motorcycles, bicycles, or my own 1965 Chevy convertible with Intamin seatbelts, (Thanks Tom Tortoise, haha) yes, it's an assumed risk. My wife chooses not to ride with me in the '65, and of course our teenage son is invincible, so there.

Coasters? One could argue that the woman at Stark Raven Mad only harmed (killed) herself and no one else by not wearing seatbelts. But she was in the back row. Had she been towards the front, who knows how many people her tumbling body could have rolled across? How many necks could have been snapped?

All 3 above examples are how just because you don't care, you can still harm others.

TLDR: Wear your F-ing mask in public!

Tommytheduck said:

I once called the police on a minivan at a stoplight that had 2 kids jumping around in the cargo area. For that I offer ZERO apologies because F that parent.

Ugh. Yeah, that's a "not my business" thing with me, too. I might call the cops if I see kids locked in a hot car on a 95° day, but my two brothers and I used to ride around unrestrained in the back of our parents' '76 Chevy Caprice wagon all the time and we somehow lived to tell the tale. Yeah, I know the laws have changed over the years, but a lot of these laws just prove my point that we're just a bunch of helpless toddlers to our nannyfied government.

So a few days ago my daughters asked if they could ride in the back area of our own Equinox from cross-country practice.

Thank god I'm not married to "Amy".

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/ask-amy-mom-livid-tw...story.html

Good God, when you had a bunch of kids together, riding in the open bed of a pickup truck to get somewhere was a treat and often part of the intended experience.

I'm old.

There was a point in time when you could do just about anything, and it was legal. We managed to grow and develop as a society and if all these laws were suddenly repealed we would continue to grow and develop just as we did in the past.

My kids are normally belted in but I also make occasional exceptions like when the soccer coach offers to ride the team in the back of his pick up to team pictures at the school because they scheduled our pictures after a game which was dumb and the fields were horrible and some parents were going to make their kids change out of uniform before they got in their cars. It was maybe a mile and a half through a small village with a low speed limit so in the back of the truck he went. I didn't care about the car interior because leather cleans well but he wanted to ride in the truck with the team and I felt it was an appropriate occasion to ride in the back of a truck. I wouldn't let him do it daily but it was a team thing, he'll remember it forever.

I always wear my belt and my kids are trained to always wear their under normal circumstances but if someone else really doesn't want to wear theirs in their own personal vehicle I don't really consider it my business.

^^^^^Oh and Vater, awesome wagon. my kids loved riding in the back of mine funny thing is even wearing a seatbelt in the third row seat I would get people occasionally telling me "you know that's dangerous, right? The back of a station wagon is dangerous..." about then is when I rolled my eyes.

I wonder if being in a car accident where your car was totaled changes your perception. It sure did for me.