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Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

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Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#721

Post by thrown_22 »

DogOfTheGaps wrote: post #712
thrown_22 wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And are now catching up. New Zealand had the equivalent of 2000 US deaths yesterday. Australia 1500. The vaccines didn't keep people from dying, they postponed them to the next flu season. The old and sick will catch covid and die. There is nothing you can do about it. Putting your head in the sand and hoping for a magic bullet to save us - vaccines, masks, lockdowns - just means that the rest of the health system wi…

This is 100% false. The COVID vaccines continue to massively decrease the risk of severe disease, including in old people.

Can you say which of:

+ New Zealand had the equivalent of 2000 US deaths yesterday.

+ Australia 1500

+ The vaccines didn't keep people from dying

Were wrong? Because a 100% false rate is a pretty high bar, especially since you already admitted 3 was true.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#722

Post by incompatible »

988747 wrote: post #572
throwaway6734 wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my personal theory is that people's overconfidence in their ability as drivers and underestimating the risk of driving ends up making the process much safer than if people were more grounded in reality

It's not even about confidence. It's a matter of being in control. When you drive you can do something about whether or not you crash. When you are a passenger in a plane or train you are completely helpless.

Apparently, such confidence is misplaced, and people "in control" crash a lot more often than helpless passengers.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#723

Post by incompatible »

Nition wrote: post #478
staticautomatic wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally those things are helpful but I think China has pretty well demonstrated that there’s no alternative universe where fully locking everything down eliminates Covid.

It worked for us in New Zealand. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ When we tried the same thing a second time it didn't work, but that was due to people not following the rules.

I think it stopped working once Covid became far more infectious. Before that, it was possible to stamp out the occasional quarantine failure.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#724

Post by stetrain »

jjav wrote: post #677
epistasis wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't agree with your assessment at all. Deaths are rising, yet what changes are happening? And in particular the NHSTA doesn't give a damn about those outside of the car. The very greatest threat to the life of my children is cars. It would be easy, trivial almost, to fix this by legalizing building for houses and businesses that don't allow cars, but are served only by public transit. Yet this very simple, very d…

> Yet this very simple, very desirable concept is illegal in the US except for a few tiny islands. I don't see how it can be illegal? HOAs have extreme power and already impose all kinds of overbearing rules on people subject to them. So you could surely get together with a few hundred likeminded people and build a neighborhood where the HOA prohibits cars.

Zoning law in large parts of this country is designed around single family homes, non-walkable suburban layouts, complete separation of residential and commercial development, and minimum parking requirements at businesses.

Interestingly, places that are dense and friendly to walking and bicycling are actually extremely popular with home buyers and renters. These places have seen prices and demand skyrocket, yet building more of them is often against zoning or other planning guidelines.

It's starting to change, many places are starting to convert to denser and mixed-used zoning and remove minimum parking requirements, but it seems to be happening slower than market demand.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#726

Post by [deleted] »

buran77 wrote: post #487
naasking wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A ”best effort” summary of this article: if thousands of people die in once place, it’s one of the great tragedies in American history. However if thousands of people die in thousands different places, it is ignored and considered a fact of life. But that makes sense statistically, because those are thousands of ostensibly independent events that don't necessarily have a single common cause, where the massacre of a…

> So of course the natural reaction is to shrug in the former case, because there's no obvious connection between them I don't think a common cause is what makes the difference, and you see it with lung cancer due to smoking. The shock factor of plane crashes is brought on by them being so rare, killing a lot of people at once, and almost guaranteeing those fatalities. This makes them shocking and unforgettable, they…

[deleted]

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#727

Post by robotresearcher »

WalterBright wrote: post #679
robotresearcher wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't. The US government doesn't force military vets and retirees to quit smoking and eating donuts. I don't think a single one of the many countries with socialized health care for all does this. They may pay for education and awareness of the risks of smoking, and they may highly tax cigarettes to dissuade you. But they don't force you.

Seatbelt laws and helmet laws.

These apply to everyone in the US, whether or not they are eligible for 'free' medical care.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#728

Post by leetcrew »

kfarr wrote: post #395
hintymad wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if occasionally you need to accelerate to a higher speed to avoid an accident?

What if that were a fecetious argument proposing a situation that does not happen in real life that people bring up when speed governors are discussed?

it's not that rare. a pretty common one (in my area, anyway) is someone starts merging into you from the side while someone is riding your bumper. if you slammed on the brakes, it wouldn't be "your fault", but it would be much better to just speed up and avoid the collision.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#729

Post by havblue »

So how much of this increase is because of increase in car weight and how much is it "road rage" or whatever you want to call it?

I definitely have noticed more aggressive drinking post covid and I hear about it more. Even a gas station worker mentioned randomly to me how people in our city are crazy drivers. This is anecdotal but I've become more worried about driving with the family.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#730

Post by sooheon »

nightfly wrote: post #630
MichaelCollins wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The disasters that happen when nuclear energy fails are amazingly bad though. Even discounting immediate human deaths, Are you sure you're not discounting that figure because it's contrary to your conclusion? Very few people have ever died as the indirect long-term result (let alone by direct immediate result) of nuclear energy accidents, even according the highest estimates from histrionic ideologues like Greenpea…

I'm overall not anti-nuclear or anything. The lasting cultural, ecological, and economic damage from severe nuclear disasters is _pretty_ significant though and we need to do a better job ensuring they don't happen if we wanna restore peoples trust in the idea of nuclear power.

That's what this topic is about -- the standard for nuclear is high (as it should be), but we take the status quo of fossil fuels without a second thought, even though it's immeasurably worse in almost every way.
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