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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

#871

Post by jrkatz »

pdonis wrote: post #688
jrkatz wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, I should have been clear. The 'certainty of punishment' bit should be understood as a probability. The gist of it is that a person considering criminal behavior isn't worried about the severity of the punishment `S` in isolation, but also the likelihood (read: 'certainty') `C` thereof. Simplistically the deterrence model is `C*S`. An extremely severe punishment (execution!) with zero or effectively zero ch…

> My little thought experiment supposes a person who is drunk evaluates, before deciding to get in the car, the potential outcomes of drunk drive, while entirely convinced they won't harm someone. And just that last clause makes it clear that, at least at that time and place, that person is not going to be deterred by reasonable incentives against reckless behavior , because their judgment is impaired. Basically, you…

> The only moral principle I have stated is that one should not impose punishments on people who have not caused actual harm

But isn't the risk of death a harm? That's what I'm driving at here. It's about where the line is drawn.

Should it be legal for someone to take shots at you as long as they miss? Drunk driving is the tip of an iceberg here.

> My point is broader: that our society seems to assume that most adult citizens, if not prevented by various nanny-state laws, will make such errors of judgment frequently enough for it to be a problem. Either that assumption is false, in which case our society is imposing huge restrictions on people that are not justified; or, even worse, that assumption is true, in which case I think our society is doomed.

This bit about a doomed society interests me. Why must society be doomed if it needs "nanny-state" laws to function? If society needs those to function and it makes them (society produces its own laws, after all), isn't that the look of a society that is succeeding? A society that regulation and fails to self-regulate is doomed, for sure.

Now then, the bit about 'most' adults needing such help doesn't come from anywhere. I agree it's a few. But if most adults don't need government incentive to drive sober, regulation preventing drunk driving abrogates a 'right' _they won't exercise_. Are their freedoms limited in that case? Or are laws against drunk driving highly targeted, impacting only the people who are driving drunk, getting them off the roads before they hurt someone?

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#872

Post by seer »

thrown_22 wrote: post #612
vineyardmike wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The banning of assault rifles is because it’s easy and doesn’t detract from peoples lives at all. Assault rifles are for assault and we don’t need more assault. So why have them? Because a few people think it’s cool to own? Pistols and other Guns aren’t very effective at stopping deaths, but they’re perceived to be good defense, so banning them en mass is less palatable. NYC banned pistols once because it was often t…

>Assault rifles are for assault and we don’t need more assault. So why have them? Because a few people think it’s cool to own? People who think this should have a grizzly bear run at them at least once. Having seen it from a car I became pro-minigun instantly.

Let's see how a place like Romania manage it - lots of bears in the Carpathian Mountains, _very_ strict gun laws.

Friends were traveling to the famous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfăgărășan just for kicks and halfway through they got SMS alerts "Bears in the vicinity" even though they were visiting foreigners. They actually saw the bears on the road itself, but a quickly dispatched van with park rangers arrived at the scene, mostly to control the traffic and protect the bears from all the people in the death machines, as well as tourists "making selfies with the bears" ... after some minutes the bears tired of the situation and left the road.

I guess my point is its a matter of implementing "a greater good" measure, and then fixing the edge cases with some smart policies / tech / people.

Like in tech sometimes its worth it to implement a big refactor that would enable faster / better code, even though it might lead to some edge cases that need to be addressed. Its tricky of course but such a _massive_ win as gun laws just can't be ignored I think.

It's like complaining that if you change your lead pipes to copper / plastic is too much work, and who cares if some people die of lead poisoning now and again, but leaks are much easier to fix with lead ... and you already have so much stock of pipes just not worth it ...

P.S. I'm truly sorry if this leads to a flame work and I know its a sensitive topic, but from a European perspective the threat of violent uprising has always been such a weird thing to put as a "benefit" having rifles around. Like if your system is designed in such a way that violence is a "check" on something ... is it really a good system? Like sure governors feel a bit scared of loonies with rifles killing them for their transgressions, but wouldn't it be better that people actually rely on safer and more gentle political transitions rather than coup d'état? And I don't think gun laws ever prevented disgruntled constituents to kill government officials - e.g. Abe in Japan.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#873

Post by BiggsHoson »

martinmunk wrote: post #834
MichaelCollins wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also mark deadly intersections and turns with white crosses, one for each person who's died there. They're worth paying attention to, and I think locals at least learn to be weary of those locations.

I've been told by driving instructors that the rule of thumb for putting up octagon STOP signs here in Denmark is only when a serious accident has occurred. I can't find a source for it, but they are definitely rarer than most other places, and I feel like they are taken more serious because of it.

Here in the US, I swear the rule of thumb for installing stop signs is only the limitation of how many can be bought under the current budget. So many intersections would be less frustrating by having yield signs, instead.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#874

Post by rob74 »

martinmunk wrote: post #834
MichaelCollins wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also mark deadly intersections and turns with white crosses, one for each person who's died there. They're worth paying attention to, and I think locals at least learn to be weary of those locations.

I've been told by driving instructors that the rule of thumb for putting up octagon STOP signs here in Denmark is only when a serious accident has occurred. I can't find a source for it, but they are definitely rarer than most other places, and I feel like they are taken more serious because of it.

Maybe the driving instructor wanted to impress upon you the importance of respecting the STOP sign with this story? Maybe it's true in some cases, but somehow I can't imagine that at an intersection with very bad visibility the traffic planners just say "let's start with only a Give Way sign and see how many accidents happen, if it's too bad we can always replace it with a STOP sign"?

It's true however that some countries are more prone to what I call "traffic restrictions overshoot" then others - e.g. in Italy there are many stretches of highway limited to 50 km/h, apparently in hopes that drivers will at least reduce their speed to 70-80 km/h, and many STOP signs hoping that drivers will at least slow down at the intersection.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#875

Post by leroy_masochist »

rootusrootus wrote: post #492
leroy_masochist wrote: post #484

My theory of why we ignore car crashes as a source of deaths boils down to a basic reality of American politics: old people vote. I'm a volunteer firefighter in a rural town in the Northeast. We handle a fairly large area and go to about 80 motor vehicle accident calls a year, of which about 20-25 require patient extrication and about 5-8 involve one or more fatalities. More of these MVAs involve a non-intoxicated el…

Nationally, close to 30% of all traffic fatalities are caused by drunk driving. About 20% of all fatalities are elderly.

Our area has an older-than-average population so I guess this tracks.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#876

Post by toss1 »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #614
toss1 wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is confusing. You seem to be suggesting that we should let the kind of barely-competent people who typically operate & maintain automobiles with a minimum of attention also operate aircraft systems with a similarly casual approach in order to make it more affordable? The nature of aviation, where unplanned problems result in unplanned non-optional landings in random locations (instead of just pulling off the sid…

> You seem to be suggesting that we should let the kind of barely-competent people who typically operate & maintain automobiles with a minimum of attention also operate aircraft systems with a similarly casual approach in order to make it more affordable? We do though. In America you can build/buy and fly your own airplane with no license, regulation or certification at all. The catch is that it must be a very small…

True, but not particularly relevant. You're referring to the Ultralight or Light Sport Aircraft categories.

These are almost entirely for recreation and not for transportation.

The basic rules limit use to VFR (Visual Flight Rules), so daytime only on nice days, limited range, etc. Wonderful for getting up and enjoying the sky, but highly impractical for transportation. We don't see grocery stores ir office/industrial parks installing short airstrip fields for the shoppers or commuters arriving in Ultralights, but they do install bicycle racks. I'd say a bicycle is far more useful in any practical sense.

So yes, in using aircraft for transportation, we're almost entirely in the regime of high regulation and expense.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#877

Post by leroy_masochist »

ip26 wrote: post #497
leroy_masochist wrote: post #484

My theory of why we ignore car crashes as a source of deaths boils down to a basic reality of American politics: old people vote. I'm a volunteer firefighter in a rural town in the Northeast. We handle a fairly large area and go to about 80 motor vehicle accident calls a year, of which about 20-25 require patient extrication and about 5-8 involve one or more fatalities. More of these MVAs involve a non-intoxicated el…

There’s more to it, elderly who can’t drive wind up stranded & isolated which is a problem in itself. If we look the other way when they slowly become unfit to drive, we aren’t forced to solve those other problems.

Yeah, this is a good point. There are a lot of lonely and sad old people out there, many of them living in increasingly hoarder-y situations as they age and lose executive function. We go on some pretty sad medical calls/welfare checks. Check in on your old relatives.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#878

Post by thrown_22 »

seer wrote: post #872
thrown_22 wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Assault rifles are for assault and we don’t need more assault. So why have them? Because a few people think it’s cool to own? People who think this should have a grizzly bear run at them at least once. Having seen it from a car I became pro-minigun instantly.

Let's see how a place like Romania manage it - lots of bears in the Carpathian Mountains, _very_ strict gun laws. Friends were traveling to the famous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfăgărășan just for kicks and halfway through they got SMS alerts "Bears in the vicinity" even though they were visiting foreigners. They actually saw the bears on the road itself, but a quickly dispatched van with park rangers arrived…

You do realize the grizzly isn't the European brown bear right?

European brown bears are cuddly lovable puppies by comparison, grizzlies are murder machines with an attitude which can outrun and out climb you.

>I guess my point is its a matter of implementing "a greater good" measure, and then fixing the edge cases with some smart policies / tech / people.

This is a prime example of being confidently wrong and making moral judgments from ignorance. It's easy to put down "those people" living in the mountains when you've never been there. It's even easier to make laws that kill them since they are obviously too stupid to know what's good for them and you'll never have to see them.

Federalism is a good thing, and not just when you can smoke weed.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#879

Post by probably_wrong »

teakettle42 wrote: post #810
montag wrote: post #797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another pet peeve: The effect of gun ownership on suicide rates goes totally ignored. Suicide accounts for 21k out of 33k annual gun deaths in the US[1]. If we're outraged by school shootings, we should be apoplectic about facilitating suicide. [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/

Nobody needs a gun to commit suicide. In countries where guns are less available, they use hanging or poison. Putting that aside, it’s not our role to forcibly limit the choices of healthy, responsible people just because some unhealthy, unresponsible people might make the wrong choices when given the freedom to do so. It’s not a societal-level tragedy if someone chooses to eliminate themselves. While it’s abhorrent…

> it’s not our role to forcibly limit the choices of healthy, responsible people just because some unhealthy, unresponsible people might make the wrong choices when given the freedom to do so.

I think your statement is missing the impact that the actions of the "unhealthy" have in others. Otherwise, there would be no reason to stop anyone from driving drunk, buying a couple kgs of uranium, or procuring flasks of Ebola.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#880

Post by Nition »

hunterb123 wrote: post #520
Nition wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's what the government says when they fail, they blame the people. It's your fault for not following orders, not our fault.

Our government was pretty careful not to put blame on the people honestly, it's really me that's blaming the people (I'm not the one that's downvoted you though).
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