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The online sci-fi magazine Clarkesworld has seen a steep increase in submissions, driven by stories created using ChatGPT and similar systems. A graph makes it look like they had fewer than 20 submissions per month for every month October 2022 and prior and then:
December: 50
January: ~115
February so far: nearly 350
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In Utah, it is legal to forcibly sterilize a person with a disability.
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Unintended Consequences
A significant contribution to understanding the unintended effects of regulation was Peltzman’s 1975 study of the effects on traffic safety of a slew of US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulations on the design of cars. In the mid to late 1960s, the federal government made a number of safety features mandatory. These included seat belts for all occupants, an energy-absorbing steering column, a penetration-resistant windshield, a dual braking system, and a padded instrument panel. In his study, Peltzman stated that the mandates aimed to reduce traffic fatalities and serious injuries sustained as a consequence of vehicle accidents. But he found something different. Fatalities were not reduced at all. Instead, deaths of vehicle occupants fell but those of pedestrians and motorcycle drivers rose. Peltzman’s tentative explanation was that by reducing the probability of being killed in a given accident, the mandates caused drivers to drive more “intensely.” His finding became so well known that economists started referring to the “Peltzman effect.”
Later studies found that drivers with anti-lock brakes tended to follow the cars in front of them more closely. A 2010 study of NASCAR accidents found that the “mandated use of a head-and-neck- restraint system has almost completely eliminated serious driver injury, while simultaneously increasing the number of accidents per race”
(from Pope and Robert D. Tollison, 2010).
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