cars
Cars.
Firearm injury 2nd: how to know this is US data without it being labeled as US data.
correct! And even in USA where there is a mass shooting like every day, the car is worse than firearms
Cars are very dangerous.
Cars
Statistically speaking, you will either die by cancer, or you will die in an automotive accident.
Don’t you mean: Statistically speaking, you will die.
Statistically speaking I’ll never die. I’m 1-0 so far.
Two way roads.
If they didn’t exist today and someone came up with the brilliant idea of having people in control of machines (cars or bikes) moving in opposite directions at 50mph, separated by a few feet and a painted line, it would be dismissed immediately.
I drive on a lot of rural roads in the UK, mainly Wales, most of the time I’m just happy when the road has space for two cars to squeeze through and some visibility for what’s coming around the corner of that rural lane. Actual physical lines separating the lanes? Oh boy it’s my birthday. Yet with all that, we have a death rate per 100 million miles of just over a third of somewhere like the US, so I’d imagine the size of cars and inadequate licence requirements are probably bigger issues for road safety
I can’t remember which episode it was but in the Cautionary Tales podcast by Tim Harford a guest once explained that cars are too safe. Through the years we blamed cars for not being safe when people get hurt but few alterations were made to our behaviour if you campagne it to the advances they’ve made in car safety. If imminent death would follow everytime we made a mistake people would be more careful. That’s how I feel about the roads in Wales. The lack of oversight made me be more cautious. That and the fact that I normally drive at the other side of the road.
The general concept you’re describing is called Risk Compensation. It feels intuitively correct, but in whatever context it’s been studied in almost all cases it turns out that the safety feature is actually better overall. Some people might be a bit riskier knowing about the safety net, but not enough to counteract the safety improvement.
Also - in the UK - road deaths go down over time, while miles driven goes up. Driving is getting safer. Cars are part of that, but so is road nd signal design and driver training.
It’s so much safer to have an accident in a modern car than one from even just a few decades ago. There’s no amount of better-than-what-we-have levels of driver awareness that can make up that gap.
Actually a positive correlation has been found between the amount of roadway lighting and car accidents. More streetlights cause more crashes.
I drive a little Skoda so I’m very cautious on those little roads, don’t have the same feeling of safety as the great big SUVs that barrel along
Rural Scotland has a lot of single-track roads. One lane for two directions, 50mph speed limit, with pull-offs every few hundred feet so cars can stop and let others pass. FUN™.
Ok, this is a weird hypothetical, but if the world had been overcast for the last thousand years, and then suddenly there was sometimes just a completely blinding light in the sky that you sometimes have to drive straight toward, it would be chaos.
Before COVID I imagined that the death toll would be so high that most roads would be shut down until technology had been developed and distributed so that you could never be blinded by the sun while driving. (Not just a flip down sun visor, but something like an LCD screen front windshield with head tracking that automatically blocks just the sun from your view).
Now I know how quickly and easily people become acquainted with mass death.
Now I imagine there wouldn’t even be a new driver’s test required that requires you to demonstrate that you can safely drive into the sunset.
Just “We recommend, but don’t require, that you have a sun visor in your car when using public roads.”
Motorcycles, for the same reason
Your car. Just think about the forces and mechanisms invovled for this to happen. Every single day we travel at 100km/h in our 2ton at least metal box surrounded by hundreds of other people in their equally large and heavy and fast machines in a space barely wide enough to react in case of an emergency(not even considering if most are actually ready to act in such a case. All of this with realistically little training. Not to mention most people don’t really pay attention while driving and certainly don’t consider the life of others while doing so. It’s so impersonal and dangerous. If it was a never heard of concept, individual cars driven by any normal person would be considered laughably stupid at the very best.
The top three causes of preventable fatal injury in the US are:
- poisoning (including drug overdoses)
- motor vehicles
- falls
We might generalize these to:
- chemistry
- engineering
- physics
im pretty sure the engineering is not at fault for most car accidents.
thats true, but we got to agree N°3 is solely Isaac Newton’s fault, for inventing gravity
I’ll never forget the last thing grandpa ever said to me:
“Stop shaking the ladder, you little shit!”
Sure, but neither is the chemist at fault when someone drinks bleach.
What about the chemical engineers creating fuels that turn out environments into toxic hellholds? Where does all of the pollution in the world come from?
We could use engineering controls to limit the speed of consumer vehicles to 10 mph, still faster than a human can walk, but slow enough that most deadly accidents could be avoided.
Then establish administrative controls to have public transportation or other professional drivers (taxi operators) have “unlocked” vehicles. They would be required to have routine training and testing to keep their unlocked license.
#1 Distracted Driving. …
#2 Drunk and Drugged Driving. …
#3 Poor Weather. …
#4 Reckless Driving and Road Rage. …
#5 Speeding. …
limiting speed would not affect the leading 4 causes of car accidents
The third is more gravity than physics, or perhaps you should consider it the absence of gravity.
What I’m trying to say is: stop following geodesics.
Also, heart disease
Dihydrogen monoxide. That stuff’ll kill you.
Psh, I drink it everyday and I’m FINE
But everyone who drinks it will die…
But it’s the stuff which is used in nuclear power plants to store the used rods.
Too much dihydrogen monoxide? Death.
Not enough dihydrogen monoxide? Also death
Just enough dihydrogen monoxide? Believe it or not, also death
Careful! It’s found in 100% of all malignant tumors!
At least here in a very anti-public transit US city: Automobiles
Short of war zones, they are the most common cause of unnatural death almost everywhere.
Ladders. Most serious workplace accidents in a lot of trades can be linked back to falling from a hight. Don’t be cocky when up a ladder, even little ones.
Ladders are legitimately one of the leading causes of death and serious injury among otherwise healthy middle aged adults. A basic fall protection system with some flex rope and a climbing harness can be had for around $100. I don’t care if my neighbors think I’m a dweeb, I’m not dying for clean gutters.
A friend of mine’s father died falling from a ladder on her birthday while decorating for her party.
That is horrifying, I hope she’s managed to recover at least a bit from that
Can confirm - fell from one this week. ;(
RIP to this man
Capitalism. Most of the other (daily, specific) dangers out there are dangerous because someone’s making money off putting other people in danger. I’m including the military industrial complex, but also regular industries and the exploitation of vulnerable populations.
Idk if we use capitalism so much as we get used…
What would you call the military industrial complex of CCCP?
Edit: I love that one reply is claiming it’s self defense, the other is claiming they’re capitalist
Necessary to prevent invasions by imperialists and capitalists who feel threatened by successful socialist models or who are looking to exploit other countries.
Imagine how much more they could have accomplished if they didn’t have to fear the very real threat of foreign invasion. Remember, they were invaded by foreign powers shortly after the revolution in 1918.
…they’re capitalist. Tell me you’ve never lived there without telling me
Swimming pools, with kids in the house. More dangerous than owning a gun:
Pools are more dangerous than owning a gun in the same way that vending machines kill more people than sharks.
People are near vending machines way more often than they are near sharks, and people let their kids play in the pool more often than they let them play with firearms
Nope. Under 10% of households have a swimming pool, but over 40% of households have a gun in the USA. When we’re talking about owning one as opposed to actively using one, the pool is more dangerous than the gun.
Now, if you just left your loaded gun out in your backyard 24/7, it may be a different story.
I don’t doubt your numbers, but that wasn’t the point I was making. Guns may be more common, but it isn’t common to let your children play with them. It is, however, common to let your children play in the pool.
The original thread was about how houses with pools have more children die than houses with guns. Your point indicated that this was only because guns are less commonplace (sharks are less commonplace than vending machines). However, guns are more commonplace. The guns sitting in a safe aren’t harming anyone. The pools sitting in backyards might be.
Fossil fuel pollution.
Electricity?
Honestly the human body is pretty weak, anything can kill us. I crave the strength and certainty of steel.
titanium implants are pretty leet though
I’ve got balls of steel!
Would you say you understand the weakness of your flesh?
