There really should be a death penalty for having a car alarm and not running out to turn it off when it’s set off. I think a deadline of two minutes is probably fair. Soon enough, people would rig the car alarm to call the person’s phone and it could be reset remotely. (Since usually a car with an alarm doesn’t end up getting stolen, right?)
Okay, it’s draconian — a death penalty is over the top in this case and should be reserved for things like murder or pedophilia or drunk driving or being a pop star comparable to Britney Spears — but it’s annoying in the middle of the night, and there needs to be some kind of incentive to shut those bloody things off quickly.
I think my proposal is more draconian: snipers positioned every quarter mile on major roads, whose job is to pick off tailgaters and people who don’t pass in the passing lane.
Ha, you know, if we had snipers taking out every drunk, offensively bad, or dangerous driver in Korea, especially positioned every half kilometer or so, that’d basically rip a big chunk out of the national population in a couple of days flat.
(Then the news would be front page on the major news portals, the political parties would either condemn or praise it depending on whether their leader or the other guys’ leader had approved the policy, and people would start driving nicely to avoid death, except the 29-30-odd people who kill themselves daily there, I suppose. Suicide by traffic sniper would probably continue for a while.)
Then again, the reduction of fatal pedestrian accidents might well make up for the losses, even including the suicide rates. This calls for treatment by those guys who do the Freakonomics books!
(Actually, I’ve heard that during the dictatorships, people drove a HELL of a lot more sanely, politely, and sensibly, out of fear. I have no evidence, beyond an academic friend saying he’d heard it plenty of times from older Koreans.)