Several thoughts running around what passes as a brain at the moment and I am not entirely sure I can pull them coherently together.
The concept of certainty has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. Ever since I was first smitten by mathematics (which was well before gamefishing) my favourite number has been zero and all the wondrous things it can do. Infinity is its natural bedfellow and is similarly intangible and intriguing. So it is with certainty. There is nothing that lives that can do anything with absolute certainty and that is just the way it should be. If we had certainty in life (I know about the death and taxes nonsense - and taxes is stretching the point in absolute terms) many of the things that make life just that, life, as opposed to an existence would disappear. Trust for instance would not be required and just think how much less rich life would be if that were removed.
No, we have to move through life accepting that the vast majority of things are not certain. Some of this we seem to be able to get our heads around quite easily. I can think of no one who buys a Lotto ticket entertaining the thought that he has certainly bought the winning ticket. But still you hand over your $13 because although you are not certain of winning it is possible that you will. The chances of winning are exceedingly low but the result of winning is very good (loads of dosh) and the result of losing is pretty inconsequential - well to most people. If you are spending $13 on Lotto as opposed to the groceries you have another sort of issue. If you buy a Lotto ticket you are not certain to win neither are you certain to lose. So if we accept that we don't have 0% chance or 100% chance of something happening we are making some progress as to how we have to go through life.
Life is not a box of chocolates, life is a repeated trip to the TAB. Every conscious decision you make is made by weighing up the odds. You try and work out what the chances are of an outcome of an action coming to pass and factor in the benefits and deficits of those outcomes and make your choice. Impossible. Well tough; you have to 'cos that's the way it is. But you do have some help. And your biggest help is the normal distribution curve. This is right up there in the theoretical stakes with the number zero. Everything that naturally happens to anything that lives from a blade of grass to me or you or the lady at number 27 occurs somewhere along this curve. I am below average height. There will be an equal number of people in a suitably large cohort who are an equal amount above average height. If I walk down the road during a thunderstorm the number of times I do it before being struck by lightning is at a point along the normal distribution curve for that activity. I find out where that point is and I take a punt and go for a stroll - or not. My choice. We live under this magical bell shaped umbrella.
What we do not live under is a square wave. You do something and this other thing will definitely and without any shadow of doubt whatsoever happen. No sir it won't - because it can't. This is where all these daft social engineering laws have their genesis of being so stupid. Sure they are embellished and massaged by a bunch of control freaks but the germ of the problem is trying to put certainty where none can exist. If you stand on a box a metre off the ground to do some work and fall off it is very unlikely that you will come to any permanent harm. But you might. Therefore everyone who stands on said box has to wear a safety harness. A sledgehammer, a walnut, a lack of understanding of the concepts we are talking about and pragmatism is down the river. If the box is on the edge of a cliff a sensible bloke would call for his safety harness because in the unlikely event of him falling off the box the consequences are now that he will end up not on a box but in one. Now that is the pragmatic solution to the problem. But to get everyone standing on boxes looking like mountaineers? I don't think so.
But that is the way modern society seems to want to go and The People's Republic is right in the van of the movement. Banning handheld cellphones whilst driving is the latest example. How many people are killed on New Zealand's roads per annum where use of a cell phone might be a contributing factor? I worded that very carefully. The media would say 'How many people are killed each year on New Zealand's roads by cellphones?' You can be killed on the road by a phone if you inhale it or are beaten to death with it but saying you died in a car crash whilst using a 'phone is the fault of the telecommunications device is several logical steps to far. So back to the question. How many? 500? 100? 50? 20? Nope, the answer is 5. How many people use phones when driving? I don't know but instances per annum is surely in the millions. So what are the chances of being killed whilst using a cellphone in a car? Without doing any maths the answer is obviously very, very low. But we are to have a law compelling us all not to do it - at all, ever. Handsfree jobbies are OK though. Good? Well no. There is absolutely no evidence (bloody inconvenient stuff is evidence, just ask Al Gore) that using a Bluetooth headset is any safer than holding the phone up to your ear. So ban those as well then. Will never happen because a) the great unwashed won't stand for it and b) it would be totally unpoliceable.
As would be banning the other distractions to driving - taking the wrapper off a pie, arguing with the kids, listening to Radio Sport, picking your nose, looking at attractive young ladies walking down the street, reading government sponsored billboards telling you that speed kills etc. etc. I think driving with one hand and holding a phone to my lughole is daft and I don't do it - much. I have a handsfree bizzo but I am under no illusion that when I am using it I am driving as well as when I am listening to Radio Sport. I can't even text when lying on a chaise longue let alone when driving a car and so I don't do that. If five people a year got to the TAB and place a fat wad of cash on using a phone whilst driving, lose and die, well tough. If they run into a school crossing well that is really, really tough but those kids probably had a greater chance of being struck by lightning.
Driving whilst using a phone is probably (but not certainly) a bad idea. But we don't need new largely unenforceable legislation to ban it. It'll make a lot of money though.
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