The majority of traffic stops in the US are, cop parks on the side of the highway somewhere the speed limit is lower than the speed people drive there, every car on the highway is doing 70 in a 55, whoever drives past gets a ticket and the government fills their coffers but the speed everybody actually drives on that stretch of highway remains 70.

Now suppose the cops stop doing that for the stated reason. If you then drive past them at 110 instead of 70, are they still going to not pull you over? Good luck with that. Even if they're actually trying to minimize traffic stops, that one's the one that makes the cut.

So then what happens if they stop doing the usual ones? People are then going to drive 70 in a 55 because they can get away with it, but that's what they were doing to begin with. You could argue that the fatality rate would be higher at 70 than 55, but then why would that change relative to the baseline where that was what was already happening?

So the argument would have to be that idiots had the impression that they could do 110 without getting pulled over, even if that wasn't true, and then did that and managed to make contact with an overpass before driving past a cop. Which doesn't seem as plausible, because speeds like that on empty desert highways shouldn't have raised the fatality rate that much (e.g. it's not that high on the autobahn in Germany), and speeds like that in traffic where there are other cars traveling significantly slower will trigger a visceral feeling of danger in nearly all humans unless they're on drugs or have significant mental health issues, and in those cases they wouldn't have been deterred by the prospect of traffic enforcement anyway. Which is why people drive somewhat over the speed limit even when that could get them a ticket -- because it doesn't feel dangerous -- but also why they don't drive a lot faster than the other cars -- because that does. Traffic enforcement or not.

Moreover, regardless of how much of a contribution was made by that vs. COVID, the numbers still don't line up with it being vehicle safety regulations.

These include

- https://circleci.com/

- https://www.travis-ci.com/

- Gitlab

Open source:

- https://concourse-ci.org/ (discussed in the context of Radicle here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44658820 )

- Jenkins

-etc.

Anyone can complain as much as they want, but unless they put the money where their mouth is, it's just noise from lazy people.

Also, the numbers for at least the US are apparently just wrong:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

1.27 fatalities per 100M VMT in 2023 (the latest year with data), 1.11 in 2010, that's a difference of 14%, not 30%. Even the peak during COVID was only 24% above 2010. The only way I can see to get 30% is to use the during-COVID number for only the total number of motor vehicle fatalities without accounting for population growth or vehicle miles traveled, which is not a great metric for making comparisons.

It's crazy because the numbers don't line up with the theory. If you look at US traffic deaths by year, they were basically flat in terms of vehicle miles traveled between 2010 and 2019 and then took a big jump from COVID which is only now starting to come back down.

Meanwhile in Europe road fatalities were also fairly flat up until 2019, and then went down significantly from COVID.

Now we have to guess why the responses to COVID had the opposite effect in each place, but it's pretty obvious that the difference was a primarily result of COVID rather than differences in vehicle safety regulations, unless the vehicle safety regulations all changed in 2020 and everyone immediately replaced the installed base of cars everywhere overnight.

Here's a list of math grants identified by the Senate to be DEI-related because they contained strings like "homo" and "inequality": https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1ioo2x9/database_of_w...

Here's the actual list of NSF cancelled grants: https://www.nsf.gov/updates-on-priorities#termination-list. You can also explore the data at https://grant-witness.us/nsf-data.html. There are 1667 in there, so I'll just highlight a couple and note the "illegal DEI":

- Center for Integrated Quantum Materials

- CAREER: From Equivariant Chromatic Homotopy Theory to Phases of Matter: Voyage to the Edge

- Remote homology detection with evolutionary profile HMMs

- SBIR Phase II: Real-time Community-in-the-Loop Platform for Improved Urban Flood Forecasting and Management

- RCN: Augmenting Intelligence Through Collective Learning

- Mechanisms for the establishment of polarity during whole-body regeneration

- CAREER: Ecological turnover at the dawn of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event - quantifying the Cambro-Ordovician transition through the lens of exceptional preservation

When the federal government cancels your grant and claws back money you've already spent because they claim something innocuous is illegal, knowing in your heart that they're wrong is not very helpful.

Someone wrote it into the grant agreement. It's a fair bet that they think that has some effect beyond what the law already achieves.