Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

strongtowns.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 1001 posts

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#581

Post by ckw »

profile53 wrote: post #231
WalterBright wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not wearing a seatbelt is an individual choice, and should not be a crime. P.S. Growing up, my dad had the dealer install seatbelts in the family wagon before he picked it up. We never moved an inch unless everyone was buckled up. Nobody else, and I mean nobody else, had seatbelts in their car at the time. P.P.S. Seatbelts also saved my life.

Not wearing a seatbelt is also a choice to force the healthcare system to support the person for 50 years after they break their neck in a preventable way. The choice is individual but the consequences are societal.

No post body was provided.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#582

Post by vel0city »

nonameiguess wrote: post #503
ineedtosleep wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many lives do you think would be saved by capping speeds to 60 MPH on I5? If alcohol or distracted driving are not factors, I would say probably close to zero. Amazing how you'd think it's actually close to zero. So many dangerous situations are removed once speeding is at least attempted to be removed from the equation. To name two: reaction times are increased, stopping distances are reduced. I probably know…

Amusingly enough, though I didn't witness this and can't verify he was telling the truth anyway, my ex-wife claimed that when she went to traffic school, the instructor there told the class the number one cause of traffic accidents on Texas highways was cars going too slow. But I suppose you could argue it's really the opposite even in those cases, that all of the people cutting you off, deciding to get onto a highwa…

A ton of highway accidents are people changing lanes going way under the average speed of traffic. If everyone was going about the same speed there would be fewer accidents. If everyone is going 75mph and you decide to go 40mph, you're putting yourself and everyone else on that highway in more danger than if you just went 75.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#583

Post by MichaelCollins »

nradov wrote: post #557
colpabar wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an extremely cynical american, my view is that we don't do anything because guns are a big industry in america, and industry controls our government in all the places that matter. But my point was more that we only ever talk about gun violence when a very specific type of gun violence occurs, and pointing out the incidents that constitute the bulk of the aggregate number usually gets you called a racist.

The entire US civilian small arms industry is tiny . The largest publicly traded gun company has a stock market capitalization of about 0.05% of Apple. The entire gun industry has an annual revenue of only $70 billion, which doesn't even register as a significant line item in our $20 trillion GDP. Any political influence the industry has is more to do with cultural factors than with size.

I think there's a hint of truth in his supposition though. The gun lobby enjoys significant popular support from the general public who want to buy guns, but they also receive support from the gun industry that want to sell guns. The intersection of these two interests is protecting Americans' right to buy guns from American gun manufactures. In this, the gun lobby has been effective.

However the gun lobby has been generally ineffective and uncaring when it comes to protecting Americans' right to import guns from other countries. Collectors like importing guns, but American gun manufacturers have little interest in that. For instance, the NRA doesn't seem very upset about the Norinco ban, even 20+ years ago when the political/strategic situation between America and China was not on the minds of many. Another example is 922(r) compliance concerning domestic/foreign part counts; notorious among gun collectors as inane, arbitrary and pointless. Yet there doesn't seem to be much drive from the American gun lobby to get this fixed.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#584

Post by TylerE »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #178
tshaddox wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to see studies that attempt to control for attributes related to "driver skill" or "driver responsibility" that you could objectively test yourself on, so that you could more accurately predict your own risk and compare it against the risk of alternatives like public transit. It's not really good enough to say "I don't drive drunk, and I'm pretty sure I'm a more skilled driver than average, therefore I can d…

The fact that we rarely if ever see such data sets is a strong data point by itself. Insurance cost (data is widely available) goes down with age and you can extrapolate from that to safety but it only falls fast initially and the rest is largely a reflection of how driving habits change with age. Occasionally someone like Tesla or Volvo will trot out some cherry picked data that boils down to "yes the very safe demo…

Can you? How about controlling for mileage driven? Older drivers are e.g. more likely to be retired and drive substantially fewer miles due to not commuting.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#585

Post by notahacker »

wrycoder wrote: post #236
jvm___ wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which baffles the rest of the world as we see the aggregate number and are dumbfounded that nothing is done.

The question under dispute is what is to be done. Removing guns from law abiding citizens is preferred by one vocal faction, rather than imprisoning criminals who use them in committing crimes (and who usually don't possess their guns legally). The other faction says that removing guns from law abiding citizens actually increases crime[0]. [0] https://twitter.com/AnneMarieWTHR/status/1549484122497843200...

As the OP said, other countries look on with bemusement at people arguing with a straight face that an anecdote involving one gun owner shooting another gun owner after he'd killed three people with an assault weapon widely and legally available locally proves that a policy of encouraging universal gun ownership is better than alternatives. Not least because some of said countries have four orders of magnitude fewer per capita gun deaths

Sure, we get that changing US gun culture might be a bit more challenging than, say, the UK, where there weren't that many people with handguns to start off with when they were banned, and so it was particularly easy to convince even most criminals carrying wasn't worth the additional penalties. What we find bizarre is that someone buys an assault weapon in the sort of store that's ubiquitous in the US and nonexistent in other countries, walks into a mall with it because local regulations say there's no reason to apprehend somebody entering a mall with assault rifles until they've killed someone, and that event gets chalked up as a win for local gun policy because the casualties were in the single digits this time due to the rare use of a civilian gun against a mass shooter

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#586

Post by aurelius12 »

alex_young wrote: post #468
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.

China represents 18% of the world's population, yet 0.07% of COVID-19 fatalities. Seems like there is some value in their approach.

If people don't like the China example, they can look at New Zealand or Australia, both of which had tiny fractions of our Covid deaths AND experienced less economic decline AND experienced a drop in suicides during the time.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#587

Post by cratermoon »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #526
alex_young wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China represents 18% of the world's population, yet 0.07% of COVID-19 fatalities. Seems like there is some value in their approach.

0.07% of reported COVID-19 fatalities. There are a lot of incentives to keep the numbers down going up the chain in the Chinese bureaucracy. This is the opposite of most western countries, where the incentives are to over-report.

> This is the opposite of most western countries, where the incentives are to over-report.

Ahem.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/22/politics/donald-trump-testing...

https://floridaphoenix.com/2022/01/06/desantis-admits-roughl...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/01/19/rebekah-jon...

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#588

Post by dahdum »

alex_young wrote: post #495
swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like pretending there are no covid deaths?

Surely they aren't covering up that many deaths right? The US is 4% of the world population, and represents 16% of the fatalities. If China had our rate of fatalities that would indicate that they are hiding 4.3 million deaths somehow.

Last year the Economist estimated them at about 1.7 million excess mortality. There is extremely strong pressure from the top down to minimize the public death count. The credibility of the party (and Xi personally) relies on their Zero Covid policy being seen as effective. I wouldn't even call it a cover up, there are just no incentives to accurately report and many reasons to downplay aggressively.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#589

Post by surfaceofthesun »

wrycoder wrote: post #236
jvm___ wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which baffles the rest of the world as we see the aggregate number and are dumbfounded that nothing is done.

The question under dispute is what is to be done. Removing guns from law abiding citizens is preferred by one vocal faction, rather than imprisoning criminals who use them in committing crimes (and who usually don't possess their guns legally). The other faction says that removing guns from law abiding citizens actually increases crime[0]. [0] https://twitter.com/AnneMarieWTHR/status/1549484122497843200...

That mindset feels reminiscent of the ever-increasing size of vehicles on the road. You avoid the smaller vehicle for fear of being run off the road (or worse) by an oversized truck and so instead of the subcompact you go with the midsize, then crossover, then SUV, ad infinitum.

Also, we’ve already been incarcerating people at an alarming rate.* It seems like there’s something more fundamental being neglected — that’s compelling Americans to use our (abundance of) weapons more readily.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarce...

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#590

Post by ETH_start »

ansible wrote: post #402
ccn0p wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Covid deaths: Simple solution, lockdown, virtual learning, 6-feet apart, cancel sports and after-school activities, miss graduations, etc. All the mental fallout from this: Too complex, just a way of life. Drip drip drip.

And if we hadn't done that stuff, we would have seen even more than the 1M deaths we did experience. Things could have gotten significantly worse as the hospitals filled up and space was not available for Covid patients and all the other people with heart attacks and other medical conditions. Even as it is, the medical staff have been overworked and extremely stressed. They've been quitting the medical field in very…

Absent a feasible zero-COVID strategy, which for most countries was never in the books due to their geographical situation, lockdowns have been found to have virtually no impact on reducing the spread of COVID.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.19...

https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature...

Lockdowns have devasted education:

https://www.economist.com/international/2022/07/07/covid-lea...

The cost to lifetime earnings is estimated to be $17 trillion:

https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2021/12/06/l...

Which will massively exacerbate poverty and all of its associated illnesses.

The education losses have been worst for the poor:

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/05/remote-learni...

Social distancing and other COVID control measures, which became mandatory with lockdowns, have been associated with a surge in childhood obesity:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037a3.htm?s_cid=mm...

And a decline in children's IQ:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34401887/

97 million more people are estimated to be poverty due to the social reaction to COVID, the most drastic and disruptive of which were lockdowns:

https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/updated-estimates-impac...

It turns out following the lead of an authoritarian communist state on the COVID response, by totally abrogating civil liberties with community quarantines, i.e. lockdowns, wasn't a great idea.

As for voluntary social distancing, it has been found to impose more measurable costs for 89% of the population than it reduces through mitigating risks of contracting COVID.

Post reply on HN