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Bruce Schneier On Perceived and Real Risks
prostoalex writes "Encryption guru Bruce Schneier takes a look at perceived and actual risks with some insightful commentary on how warped the public perception of risks may be: '...we worry more about anthrax (with an annual death toll of roughly zero) than influenza (with an annual death toll of a quarter-million to a half-million people). Influenza is a natural accident, anthrax is an intentional action, and the smallest action captures our attention in a way that the largest accident doesn't. If two airplanes had been hit by lightning and crashed into a New York skyscraper, few of us would be able to name the date on which it happened.'"
Bruce Schneier for president!
I would remember it, especially if they took out both towers of the WOrld Trade Center...
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. -Confucius
If two airplanes had been hit by lightning and crashed into a New York skyscraper, few of us would be able to name the date on which it happened.'"
But I'm pretty sure if it happened on the same day and dropped both towers it'd be every bit as famous as the one we had.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I'd argue that at this point (in the US, at least) there are very few people who are more worried about anthrax than about influenza, particularly the possibility of an H5N1 outbreak. Of course, that probably has more to do with the media flogging than anything else.
To what extent does seeing the media worry about something drive us to worry about it, too? And how does the media decide what to sensationalize?
well, while everyone's reading the 'non-geek security' thread, FIRST POST!
(damn those 'slow down cowboy' messages... FIFTH POST!)
Without consulting google, on what date did the Indian ocean tsunami hit?
It might also be worth mentioning that in an average hour, 6304 people die. That's more than twice the number of people who died in the September 11th attacks (2973). I'm not saying those attacks weren't a big deal, but maybe we are overestimating their effect a bit?
Wouldn't have remembered what happened? Heck yes we would have. At least new yorkers anyway. I want to know what the heck you do for a living that two planes crashing and leveling buildings in major cities due to lightning hits is considered mundane and unremarkable.
I keep telling myself I'm not the desperate type.
Plus it's amazing how many people have no idea about the 1918 Flu epidemic that killed between 50 - 100 million yet the only significant event that caused a heavy death toll that we often remember of the period was the Great War.
And no, I couldn't give a shit what my karma is.
"You can't make this stuff up:
A retired veteran and candidate for Oklahoma State School Superintendent says he wants to make schools safer by creating bulletproof textbooks.
Bill Crozier says the books could give students and teachers a fighting chance if there's a shooting at their school."
why wasn't -that- slashdotted??
Makes sense to me.
I look both way before crossing the street. I don't check mail for anthrax before opening. I am aware of influenza and take precautions so I don't get sick. I don't take any precautions before entering tall buildings. People remember those deliberate acts because they want to know what else they need to be aware of, what other dangerous events they need to safeguard themselves from.
Paint yourself into a corner, burn the bridges!, and you will feel the liberty of a man who has nothing to lose!
I'd argue that it's not so much real and perceived risks, but more like everyday, and extraordinary risks. People get numb to everyday stuff even common causes of death. After all everyone already knows the whole you've a greater chance of dying from car crash/choking/falling/etc then terrorism/anthrax/whatever.
You're more likely to be killed by a car accident than terrorism. You can take steps to reduce the odds, but they will always be there. With few exceptions though, the other drivers are not trying to kill you. Your car, the weather, or whatever it is causes the accident is not an intelligent being that "has it in for you".
So. Are people irrational or not? Maybe not. Terrorists, if successful, can destabilize the whole society. It hasn't happened yet, but in theory, left unchecked, it could. OTOH, lightning strike incidence can be looked up in an actuarial table, and is not likely to increase very much.
While I often agree with Schneir on a lot of things, I disagree that the actions of intelligent beings (the terrorists) can be fairly compared to the random acts of nature. Human beings are probably "programmed" to respond differently to intelligent threats. That sounds like a successful survival strategy to me.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The Tsunami led to way more deaths than the WTC attacks did. Yet it received far to little press and nowhere near enough aid.
Without going to look it up, see if you can recall the date of the Indian Ocean tsunami in less than 3 seconds.
Dear Mr. Schneier,
I will be back to work on Monday. Thank you for covering for me while I was on vacation.
Sincerely,
Captain Obvious
automobiles in the U.S. than serviceman who died in the entire Vietnam conflict.
But we're used to driving in cars, and accept the tradeoffs. Also, we feel more in control when driving. Like the article said, once something becomes commonplace, it's no longer news.
There was a local news story some years ago about a town that was going to have a lot of houses moved and land dug up due to radon. They finally determined the risk wasn't high enough and they didn't have to do the digging. During the process, several townspeople suggested spending the money that would have gone to radon removal and use it to redesign and intersection where traffic accidents killed several people from that small town each year. Unfortunately, the intersection was "functional" and deemed not worthy of the towns limited budget.
I put terrorism in a different category though. There are people in the world actively trying to do as much damage and kill as many americans as possible. I sure as hell want my government actively trying to stop them. There are also very few natural or accidental occurences that have the potential damage that a nuclear detonation in a major city would cause. The first job of government is to protect its people. Aggressively when required.
People exaggerate spectacular but rare risks and downplay common risks.
How many smokers truly care about getting lung cancer and dying, but are concerned about being blown up by a terrorist?
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
Looking at what Schneier is saying, what humans are really doing is paying less attention to non-intelligent threats, even though they are more deadly. That does not sound like a successful survival strategy to me.
would lead to the inner city schools actually having up to date books (or books at all).
When people fly two planes into the WTC, and their fellow travellers express the intent to conduct further attacks, the human intention behind it is pretty clear. Accidents happen, of course, but generally people aren't *trying* to get into car accidents. The idea that people are out there dreaming up further schemes involving mass destruction is what freaks people out. Sure, the odds are still absurdly low that you or I are going to get whacked by terrorists, but human beings are deliberately trying to create the destruction. I think it feels much more personal when you realize that human beings are behind these events, rather than random chance or nature.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
As a member of the SCA who participates in Heavy List Fighting. From time to time I end up talking to non members often parents and there children. All to often I get the question, "isn't this dangerus?" I all to often reply "not as dangerus as driving here."
People will jump in a car and drive to the store. Then till you how dangerus it is to do X or Y.
What I would love to see would be an analysys of the number of highway deaths that accured becase more people drove and are driving futher and more often since 9/11.
More facts about Bruce. http://geekz.co.uk/schneierfacts/
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
How many people do you know taking measures to make certain they don't get Anthrax poisoned?
How many people do you know taking measures to stay healthy and thus prevent the Flu?
How many people do you know that wear their seatbelts and drive cars with airbags to prevent vehicular deaths?
What the news talks about and how people act on a day to day basis are vastly different.
The first job of government is to protect its people. Aggressively when required.
You will be perfectly safe in your jail cell, no doubt.
It's folly to deny that we're just out of the age of tribal culture, and many of us are still there. Stir in fear, my-god-is-better-than-yours,-heathen, make some insulting commentary, and it's a recipe for explosiveness.
Add in greed, as in oil greed and thirst (it used to be water and arable land) and you get Iraq, as no proof has been forthcoming of any of the reasons we went to war there. Instead, we shot about $3trillion getting revenge for about 3K deaths.... this after we went to war for Kuwait and rubbed out about 300K Iraqis (so far the total to be 650K+ now).
For what? Oil? Some odd sense of Christian honor? For the poor people caught in the WTC buildings? Islam was comparatively quiet until we stuck a stick up the hornets nest. Now Bush has mobilized some large multiplier of people against the US, and the actual values the US stands for, not the greed of oil politics.
Now more soldiers have been killed than at the WTC and Pentagon and Flight 93 combined. We have almost nothing to show for it. Iraq is crumbling, there will be no oil from there for ages at best, and there are the dead Iraqis, the dead misguided Taliban, lots of soldiers from Italy, Denmark, Germany, Poland, Australia, and the US. There is little hope for peace in the region, the financed debt is enormous-- even mindboggling, and I'll admit: we're nature, and as we get smarter, the stakes get higher and higher. Were it a 'natural', not murderous or 'act of manslaughter' we might indeed forget. But add in the human's bruised ego and testosterone, and stand back, open your wallets, and find some clips.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
would have to think about the header of this article. Wouldn't that be nice, don't you think?
Mandated laws for seatbelts - airbags in every car - licensing for every driver - improved roads, signs - speed limits - Where isn't the war on cars?
kills a ton of people each year.
I'd hazard a guess that more people are concerned about bird flu than the garden variety (i know it varies from year to year) yet they are more likely to die from the latter.
But we also see this in situations that are not so human made. Take west nile. Perhaps 1 in 50,000 people might get sick each year, most not enough to notice. Perhaps on in a couple million might die. A person is perhaps 100 times more likely to die in a car accident. (Not that car accidents don't have their own share of profiteering) In the case of west nile, however, the risk is very slight, and yet ad campaigns for various also dangerous products make it seem like if you don't take precautions, the child might as well be on in the middle of a pitched battle in Iraq. Of course, on product, DEET is meant to be used for short periods, in small doses, and not for small children. The mania over west nile probably causes some off label use
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
On 9/11/2001 something just short of 5k people died at the hands of terrorists, while around 25k died of starvation, and 32k died in auto accidents. Of course the second two happend again on 9/12, and 9/13, and 9/14 ...
XML is the best data format; unless your data needs to be read or written by a human or a computer.
It makes interesting reading, particularly when you compare it to our perceived risks.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
You'll be amazed at what cognitive psychologists have learned about what humans' thought processes are regarding risks. Google, Wikipedia, the usual sources.
Doug Jensen
Well, there's no little $100,000.00 box that goes beep in the presence of influenza that I know of. If there was, then we would be all in-terror of the next outbreak of it, you can count on that.
- I stole your sig.
I applaud Mr. Schneier for bringing to light the availability heuristic.
Essentially, that sums TFA up in two words. When something's drummed into your brain on a regular basis, your brain begins to classify it as being real or genuine; it's a more "available" scenario or assertion to you. While in this particular case it proves cause for a lot of fallacies about terrorism, and the media/politicians take advantage of it regularly, it's actually something you do as a way of survival (think Darwin); it allows your brain to "fill in" where you are lacking in actual facts and information.
If that skyscraper then collapsed, killing 3000 people, I'm thinking we'd remember it. If not the exact date, at least the fact that it happened. Witness Katrina- an accident in which far fewer people died than on 9/11. Do I remember the exact date Katrina hit? Nope. But I do remember it happened.
Is it really so mystical that people would react more strongly to intentional threats than to accidental ones? I could get hit by a meteor and die instantly when I walk outside tomorrow. There's nothing interesting about that, though, since it's essentially random, and there's nothing I can do about it anyway.
As human beings, we seem to have an inborn fear of homicide, whether it's from a stranger breaking into your house, or a group of 'those guys over there' coming over and killing us en masse in an act of war. I think recent human history was incredibly violent, with cycles of revenge killings, and this had seletcive pressure on the human psyche.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Given the number of people who don't remember the year that "9/11" occurred in I suspect that if the event didn't have political significance it wouldn't have been named "9/11" and that date would not be something people remember.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
"Don't Worry, Be Happy" - Bobby McFerrin
* 2nd ref: footnotes
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Natural disasters evoke stoicism, or might make us mad at God. Depraved actions of another human being are fascinating because we are constantly struggling with our own desires to do what we know is wrong. "Would I do any better in the other guys shoes," we wonder. The more frenetic my denouciation of the evil terrorists, the more likely my own struggle against evil is on the brink of failure. Those who have hard won victories against the evil within know better - "there but for the grace of God go I".
Is this really insightful, seems more like a trivial observation.
... a war on hours
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
he smallest action captures our attention in a way that the largest accident doesn't.
You mean like the Hindenburg, the Titanic, the Andrea Doria, and Swissair flight 111?
Here's a date for you: Dec 26, 2005.
How about Friday the 13th? That's a date that everyone remembers, and they don't even remember why.
Or the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918?
Be careful when you say "the largest accident."
I suspect that we wouldn't really remember the exact date September 11th if the Government and press didn't keep jamming it down our throats, however.
You do have a point though. More people have died in the 20th century from car accidents than have died from both murders and war combined. It is the single most common way to die accidentally, outranking the next reason by four to one, yet noone does anything about that. And yes, influenza is so common that it has a nickname. Most people don't think about it much because despite the danger, it's something we survive year after year.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Sure, influenza might kill thousands of people, but some people are much more at risk than others. It's harder to rule oneself out as a target for a non-military attack, since it probably doesn't depend on whether you have a weak immune system, ingest harmful substances on a regular basis, or spend extended hours in a vehicle. This theory is even testable: I predict that people living away from cities and who aren't dependent on infrastructure will be more worried about illnesses and hardly care about terrorist attacks (unless they have loved ones living in large cities).
But anthrax could *potentially* wipe out millions. Further, the flu mostly kills older people. This might sound "cold", but at least older people have already lived a full life, and are probably already near the end if flu kills them. We cannot say the same about the kids that anthrax would kill. It is fairer to spend more to protect kids than the elderly in my opinion.
Table-ized A.I.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Duh. And for very good reason.
We remember 9/11 because the terrorists knew it would have maximum effect if it was done on on that date. They fully understood the US mindset and knew we would associate it with dialing 911. So when the news media quickly picked up on that and started calling it "911", they were actually unwitting participants in the terrorist propaganda. They effectively created a national "terror holiday."
If a plane randomly crashed into a building, it would be approximately just as likely to happen on any day of the year. The difference is that we tend to remember things that happen on "important" dates, even if those dates don't always fall on the same day each year (e.g. Valentines Day ice storm of 19xx, Easter Tornado of 19xx, Memorial Day flood of 19xx, Fourth of July fire of 19xx, etc). If it happened on an "unimportant" date, only some of us would remember it as "the time that plane crashed into something on my cousin's best friend's birthday," and you'd hear people talking saying things like "she had just blown out the candles, and then her face went white as a ghost. Suddenly we all turned and looked at the TV and saw (blah blah)". But if it happened on a nationally important/recognizable date -AND- it was picked up by the national media, then most people would still remember it 5 years later.
It was a good read, as is generally the case for bruce, but this sentence he quoted to seemed like it could have been written better. And by written better I mean I think it scalded my flesh:
Ugh.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
The victims of 9/11 were murdered.
More money has been spent researching virally infectious diseases then anthrax.
I didn't read the article, but jeez, what a moron...
This talk of 9/11 and deaths really couldn't have come at a worse time. I'm flying to America tomorrow, and although after RTFA I should feel better about plane travel, it really is the last thing I need. If not simply for the reminder of the potential for horrible fiery death that comes with air travel (no matter how unlikely) then also for the fact that barely 24 hours before I'm due to fly the NSA will link my internet usage to a discussion about 9/11 and also Wikipedia pages about the Lockerbie disaster and plane hijackings. If I'm not back posting in three weeks someone send help c/o Guantanamo Bay.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Why can politicians get away with making claims such as, "If the Democrats gain control of Congress, the Terrorists have won"? Or consider one I heard recently in a House candidate debate: "[Candidate X] voted against making it a crime to operate a meth lab near children, and voted against notifying parents when out of state sex offenders move into their neighborhood." Come. On.
What kind of idiots do these politicians take us for?
It isn't just that we let them get away with it, we shout and cheer them on!
Where's the sanity check? Don't people think, "Wait a second... Either this candidate took special interest money from the powerful meth-lab lobby (laugh), or there's probably more to this story"? Don't people think, "Wait a second... isn't it already absolutely, amazingly illegal to run a meth lab *anywhere*?" "Is this candidate really batshit crazy and against notifying parents when dangerous sex offenders move in next door, or is there more to this story?"
Or, "Wait a second, this is a political add not Freddy vs. Jason III. I shouldn't conclude this candidate is Hitler Jr. just because the picture is dark and the voice is scary." Please? Anyone?
What kind of idiots to these politicians take us for? The idiots that we are, apparently.
They keep doing it because it works.
I think what the blogger and the author intend to say is that peoples fears tend to be irrational.
Risk analysis is rational, and is different from the examples he gives.
Back to irrational fears. A great book on this topic is "meaning of anxiety" (r. may, c. 1977). He discussed why fears are irrational, especially in children. We project irrational fears, because they really don't happen to us, so we worry for a while, then stop and get on with life. To express real fear on what is likely to happen to us would cause deep anxiety 24/7, and no one could live like that.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
The GP poster is correct; your examples (mostly *) are all actual incidents of a public safety issue; the GP's examples are all examples of enforcement of a rule already enforced by the situation:
- reckless driving: thought crime, ticket them only if they have an accident
- putting $1.50 in a broken meter: thought crime, ticket them only if they exceed the amount of time $1.50 would have bought them
- failing to signal in a turn-only lane: thought crime, ticket them only if the *don't* turn
* speeding is relatively arbitrary; what consitutes a safe speed depends on the road conditions, the engineering specifications for the roadway and vehicle, and the ability of the driver. This is why there is a "basic speed law", and why Interstate highways have different rules than state highways (hint: the state is not permitted to regulate what constitutes a safe speed on a federal roadway).
Most tickets these days are about revenue collection. Those that aren't are based on the _perception_ of public safety, which is based primarily on the visibility of the officers to the public.
This is why, in dense metropoliton areas, such as the Bay Area, you rarely see people pulled over for "fixit tickets" on expired registration/no registration/broken lights/cracked windshields/bald tires/failure to signal before lane change/etc. - low revenue tickets which, with the exception of the first two, are in fact public safety related.
I'm facetiously waiting for them to paint "This side towards enemy" on the customer side of the desks at the DMV...
-- Terry
Around 45,000 transportation-related deaths take place in the US every year. That's 15 times the number of premature deaths that occurred on 9-11. Every year.
http://trb.org/news/blurb_detail.asp?id=5380
The point is that if we were truly concerned about our lives, we would pay attention to this problem with as much vigor and zeal as we pay attention to terrorism - or American Idol. But this kind of fact doesn't get any play in the media. It is roundly ignored.
Just because the deaths are dispersed doesn't mean the cost or the tragedy is any less. Put those 45,000 bodies in a pile together with all the twisted metal and accident debris, and you have a pretty nasty mess.
And there are at least 6 times as many injuries as there are deaths. Transportation-related injuries raise healthcare costs for everyone, over a long span. Such things are not fixed in part because the systems are too entrenched. And tragedy is profitable to many. Insurance, pharma, etc. "A stitch in time saves nine," sure. But just think of how much you can charge for those nine stitches!
But they are also not fixed because of the diffuse nature of the events. There is a lack of public awareness to these surprising statistics. And due to our cultural conditioning it is anathema to openly compare lifestyle-related self-destruction to obliquely-motivated wanton destruction. Because the themes are too emotional for our rational minds to engage them.
Yet the fact is that beneath the themes that color these events, the dynamics are simple. Directed energy spells consequences. American progress, the lifestyle of travel, coupled with imperfect systems, leads us to a certain amount of collective self-destruction, which we accept as the cost of our manner of being. Meanwhile, energy is being directed from without to harm and punish us collectively. Outwardly destructive and wanton, our foreign policy has been and remains: to instill instability in regions we wish to usurp, and to engage openly only with those who are sufficiently subservient to capitalist interests. We step on many toes, and we get bitten by radicals, sometimes even the very radicals we armed and trained in the first place.
Fact is, even with so many deaths every year, from major causes (like transportation-related incidents and heart disease and obesity), and minor causes (like electrocutions and terrorism), we're still increasing in numbers and thriving generally. The herd is healthy enough, so if a few are culled it's acceptable to the bottom line - the bottom line of those who are paying attention to such numbers. Those who know and could do something, aren't, in any case. So draw your own conclusions.
Contaminate some chip fabs?
You could do that by getting a number of people employed at various fabs in an entry level position, and have them dump a bunch of powder with a moderate sublimation point in critical areas, and they could keep doing it until they started an investigation as to why chip yields had dropped to 1% of what they used to be.
Don't worry, I initially had the same question on 9/11, mainly "how could they be so stupidly ineffective in their choice of economic targets?".
But then I realized that terrorists are not interested in being effective in terms of traditional combat measures, other wise known as "kill ratio", or more generally, as "greatest military benefit for least cost".
Terrorism is no at all about military action; that's precisely why a "war on terror" is such a dumb idea.
PS: While we are at it, can someone pont me to the URL for the Library of Congress archive for the Articles of War ratified by Congress that made the "war on terror" an actual war, rather than a global exeditionary police action?
PPS: Can someone also tell me what the victory conditions are? I.e. will it be when we parade terrorisms body through the streets of New York on a post and throw it on a bonfire in Central Park?
Thanks,
-- Terry
Obligatory Futurama reference.
TT
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same..."
More important than life itself: "Give me liberty or give me death."
See alternate view:
"I believe the most solemn duty of the American president is to protect the American people." - G. W. Bush
"There's no bigger task than protecting the homeland of our country." - G. W. Bush
"Our first priority is the military. The highest calling to protect the people is to strengthen our military." - G. W. Bush
"When war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded." George Orwell, 1984.
With a continuous war, can we now disregard the most palpable fact that our country is first and foremost about freedom?
You have been eaten by a Hurd of GNU.
The trouble is that there are very few genuine 'accidents'. Getting drunk and driving a car into a tree is not an accident. Driving too quickly or too close to the car ahead is not an accident. This is preventable human behaviour - just because the intent is not there does not make it less of a threat.
Yes, that is exactly why people are so much more worried about things like terrorism. With something like driving, you always are either making choices yourself (deciding to drive when drunk) or have the ability to somewhat prevent an accident (like seeing someone is about to hit you in a rear view mirror, and moving off the side - something I have done several times over the years and prevented a sure accident). Having control, even the illusion of control, is an way that people keep calm in extreme situations - they control what they can.
Now take terrorism, in combination with planes. In a plane pretty much everything is already out of your control - if the plane decides to lose an engine you're not the one flying it to the ground. Now compound that with someone obsessed with the idea of attacking planes, are terrorists seem to be. All the sudden you have a lot of factors you have no control over, and terrorism is intent but no accident that you have any control or predictability over.
I think people are more worried though about planes blowing up than terrorists taking over planes, because there again you have some control over what happens as passengers in situations since 9/11 have shown.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Joseph Stalin said, "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic."
The reason that we're under-estimate the common and over-estimate the rare is because of the associated predictive information. Car accidents are easy to avoid: drive the speed limit. Influenza is easily beaten: get a vaccine. Electrocution is dodged by not touching the hot line. We know how to beat it, so it becomes an odds game.
The problem with the more rare things, such as a car bomb, terrorist biological attacks, and lightning, is that they're random without any notion of what causes any given person to be the one whose odds were up. Statistically, it'd be impossible for a nameless person to be the one hit. But we're not concerned with the nameless person, we're concerned with our own survival, and having no control over the situation is what invokes fear, not the numbers. If I could buy special shoes that prevented the rare genetic disorder that doesn't have a name yet, I wouldn't be afraid of it anymore.
You're more likely to be killed by a car accident than terrorism. You can take steps to reduce the odds, but they will always be there.
This is a comparitive statistic that people love to bandy about, but it's really a poor comparison.
You have loads of control over the likleyhood of being hurt or even killed in a car "accident". If you are an aware driver, you can prevent almost any accident or control the degree of damage done to you and others... for instance if I am braking I am always looking in the rear view mirror and what people behind me are doing. This has saved me several times from sure rear-endings, even some major accidents where I would have easily been crushed between two cars like an accordian. You can adjust the probably of being in a car accident to a rediculous degree, to the point where almost anything is more likley. Once while driving in the snow I saw someone coming around a curve ahead of me way too quickly - I pulled off the side of the road, and they spun out right into the lane I had been in before. It's all about knowing conitions, and analysing behviour of others around you who are often telegraphing future intent.
Meanwhile being hurt in a terrorist act is true chance. Are they going after trains? A water supply? You can't tell when and where something may happen, and so you can't take any steps to avoid anything. Your abililty to adjust that probably is almost nil.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Duh! It looks like an emergency number!
That is why we remember the date. That and the fact that we refer to it as 9/11, whereas we refer to other incidents by names such as "Pearl Harbor".
It is also a big event because it's new. We already know tons of people die in car accidents, so we're cynical and jaded to that -- but 9/11 is a change, so we notice it, and thousands of people died, so it shocks us.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Are people really paying less ATTENTION to threats, or in fact are they simply WORRYING less about non-intelligent threats?
There is a huge difference. I would say WORRYING (and thus planning for the prevention of) intelligent threats is far smarter, as they are a longer term threat that much be planned for as opposed to truly random threats which must be dealt with as they arrive.
I pay plenty of attention on the road, but am more concerned longer term as a citizen with terrorist action than with the more local concern of driving.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Im sure that whole conspirisy was a heck of a lot easier to orchestrate than maybe driving a dozen trucks packed full of explosives into the basement.
Sure it wouldnt be as easy as somehow wiring the whole building up for a controlled demolition, cause those trucks would be hard to drive.
And lets not forget that the matter of 2 jets full of people crashing into the towers wouldnt be enough to enrage the population into allowing the goverment free reign, the buildings and adjacent buildings needed to collapse also.
There are a lot of other more belivable theories out there to embrace.
this one seems a bit to complicated for most people.
If this was planned it would have been almost impossible to pull of without detection and nobody talking after.
Yes but you can't be free if you are dead or taken over. That is why you must in fact "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." through the use of force, as history has shown us.
Agressive defense is a pretext for the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They are plenty worried (in general) about Bird Flu already, even without remembering that.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Airbags my ass!
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... ohh.. and a safety belt cutting device ....
...
.... than maybe less people would fly off the road ....
.... and before you ask: i drive a motorbike, and when not, I drive a RWD, AIRBAG to be removed aso soon as my racing seat is installed ...
sorry to say, I never had an airbag, and just bought a used car with an airbag and here is what I am going to do:
REMOVE it ASAP, and put a 3 or 4 or 5 point safety belt into the car with a decent (perhaps racing) seat
I think airbags cause more injuries than necessary...
what cars need is a rugged interior and a rollcage, racing seats and a decent padded safety belt (racing style)
not airbags that burn you and break your arm, not monitors that take your concentration from the road, not bass pumping stereo that make you unable to hear your engine
in other words: don't pimp my ride with MTV crap and safety looking crap: put in a rollcage, a decent seat, good brakes and a fire extinguisher
ps: instead of governments making rollcages illegal (not streat legal)l, they should lower your insurance if you have one
ohh. and that is what I think: instead of promoting front wheel drive as a safety feature, companyes should start putting out RWD wehicles and stop saving on their customers and brainwashing them
just my idea of a car
OK, I give, what happened that date?
You do realize the tsunami happened on Dec. 26, 2004.
Not just more deadly. They have even less respect for human life than al-Qaeda, are even less subject to deterrence, and can never be reasoned with or co-opted like animate threats sometimes can be. Wolves we have turned into our best friends, but smallpox we had to exterminate.
Smallpox, by the way, killed more humans than all the combined murderous dictators of the charnel house we call "the twentieth century".
The problem isn't accident versus action.
The problem is the news outlets, which concentrate on novelties and what they can sensationalize.
A family in car crashed in a tree, all 4 dead? Not fun. No novelty, this happens every day.
A soldier killed by accident by "friendly fire", well that's worthy of regurgitating for the months to come.
The media really believe they can't interest the public in actions that occur every day.
Do they report every bombing in Israel or Iraq now? Well for Iraq they kinda mention it, but for all these years the Israel attacks were mostly ignored. They happen every day: just not that interesting, not a novelty.
If US would be bombed every second day by terrorist, you'd hit a point where each separate attack won't be reported anymore. It'll be something you live with, something you certainly don't ignore, but it kinda starts to move to your blind spot.
4x10^9 > Bush
There's all sorts of analogies you can make. Some are not so appropriate. But a key thing to understand is that the response to a perceived threat can actually be more of a problem than the threat itself. In the case of terror and 9/11, the response has been a major disruption of power balance in the middle east. It's hard to estimate exactly how many died, whose fault that was and whether these people had it coming or not. Fact remains that that number is many times the number of people killed on 9/11. Also some high ranked politicians and army people are actually voicing the opinion that terror threat actually got worse due to the invasion of Iraq. And of course even the number of US casualties in the war on terror is set to exceed the number of lives lost during 9/11 pretty soon.
:-).
Another interesting response to a threat is gun ownership (in response to perceived threat from crime). Many people die each year from accidents with guns bought for 'protection'. People end up accidentally shooting themselves, their relatives or innocent people who happen to be in the wrong place instead of the hypothetical burglar for which the gun was bought. There's actually people arming themselves to the teeth to 'protect' themselves from perceived threats without realizing that them being armed to the teeth is an accident waiting to happen. News reports of mentally unstable people (highschool kids in some cases) using legally purchased guns (plural!) are all to common in the US. It's hardly news anymore unless the killer manages to kill a few people. Also because there are so many guns, criminals are pretty much guaranteed to be armed. I'd probably want a gun if I were living in the US just because of that
Of course in computer security related matters, there's such interesting things as people losing unencrypted USB sticks with important files because their sysadmins made it impossible/difficult/inconvenient to transfer files using e.g. email or IM between their laptops. Lock down a system properly and your users will start being creative to find ways around your security measures. I've seen this so many time: oh can I borrow your usb stick to pass my confidential powerpoint slides to that guy over there? My company wastes vast amounts of money on laptop security. The measures have a severe impact on performance so everybody needs rediculously fast laptops just to do ordinary office stuff.
Jilles
How many journalists, writers, filmmakers and parliamentarians do you have to kill or threaten to turn a free country into a non-free country?
Why do I ask, you should say? Well, in my own country (Holland) there has so far been only one trerrrorism casualty, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Killed because he dared to criticize Islam. Many so call progressives (you would call them liberals) downplay this event. What's 1 person in 16 million? they say. Just like Bruce.
In the mean time there are death threats against parliamentarians, kabinet ministers, columnists and any public person who dares to criticize Islam.
Stil, only a tiny percentage of the population, you might say. And after all you just have to keep you mouth shut and the problem disappears, right?
So, there we are, this wonderful little liberal (in our sense) country where we could discuss anything we wanted has lost it's freedom of speech with just one murder. Well, who needs freedom of speech anyway? Who cares, Bruce?
I do.
X.
Without consulting google, on what date did the Indian ocean tsunami hit?n ami+date
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=indian+ocean+tsu
If you delay pleasure infinitely, the pleasure will be infinite. (YM)
Thank you for the excellent example of how people perceive risks to be vastly higher than they actually are! People frequently hear of injuries caused by safety devices and assume that they are risky, when in actuality they prevent far more serious (often fatal) injuries that would be caused whatever would happen if they weren't used.
Some people actually believe that an airbag is likely to kill them, and try to get them disabled or removed. In reality, there have been a few dozen people killed by them and a few thousand saved (out of a couple million deployments in 10s of millions of cars with them). Since you never hear of people saved by airbags (because it's fairly routine) and somebody being killed by one is rare enough to make the news, people have flawed perceptions that make them think that the less-likely event is actually more likely to occur.
If somebody is really foolish enough to think that converting their vehicle to a racecar configuration (5-point restraints, roll cage, RWD) would make them safer, they probably deserve whatever Darwin has for them. Street cars face much different conditions (snow, trees, oncoming traffic, etc.) which make all those things inappropriate. Roll cages are great in race cars because such cars frequently have lots of energy in crashes that gets dissipated by rolling over many times. Most people who die in rollover crashes in passenger cars do so because they weren't wearing their seatbelt, not because their car crushed them from the impact. Using a tight restraint in a race car makes sense because it's important to just keep the driver in one piece. In a passenger car the key is to reduce the number of injuries, and it's far more dangerous to be stopped immediately by your restraints and suffer damage to internal organs (particularly your brain as it hits your skull) than it is to hit an airbag and suffer minor external injuries.
dom
Where does that rank in percieved risk?
"667 - Neighbour of the beast"
Well most times when a giant high-rise is on fire, these guys with fire hoses and other equipment show up to put the fire out. In the case of WTC 7, the NYFD made a decision fairly early on to pull back from the building and not attempt to control the fire. As a result, the fire burned out of control, ignited the generator fuel storage tanks (of which there were several, on multiple floors; I can't remember the exact placement but it's discussed in the reports, there were smaller tanks near the generators with a few thousand gallons that act as reservoirs to keep things running while the pumps move fuel up from the main tanks; plus the pumps may have continued to run during the fire and pumped fuel up into the burning building from the underground tanks), the rest is history. Once you get enough heat the structural steel starts to deform; once it deforms the geometry of the building is lost, and it collapses. (And the collapse doesn't have to be at the base of the structure to take the whole thing down: if you collapse one floor in the middle of a building, effectively "dropping" the top half 10 or 15 feet onto the bottom half of the building, that's probably going to crush the bottom and result in a complete collapse. Buildings are built with safety factors, but they're not that big.)
What's most interesting about WTC 7 is that it's an experiment that we don't get to do very often: "what happens to a high-rise building if the fire department doesn't show up?"
Now, most high-rises don't contain as much diesel fuel as that one did, so maybe it wouldn't happen exactly the same way in some other situation, but WTC 7 should really serve as a case study in the instability of the urban environment during times of complete infrastructure breakdown. If you don't have water pressure to run the fire-suppression systems (once the rooftop tanks run out), and you don't have firefighters working to contain the blaze, a modern steel structure may not be as stable as people think they are.
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I believe the original Friday the 13th was Friday, October 13, 1306. On that morning, King Philip IV of France had his seneschals unseal orders to arrest the Knights Templar for heresy, treason, and a host of other sins. Well, there you go, it's again an action done by someone, rather than a chance natural disaster or something like that.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Al Qaeda and Powerball operate on the same principle here.
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
As an American, I'm offended you think I don't know about Boxing Day.
It's the day you celebrate all the brave lads who died to keep China British.
Human beings, by design, are carefully attuned to attitudes of human beings as related to each other. It is a survival mechanism that allows us to function in groups, which we have to in order not to become a "box lunch" for physically more capable opponents in nature. Therefore, any serious threat inside the human social structure is one that we are conditioned to take very very seriously. If nature goes bad, in theory we can run away. We can't run away from each other. A threat from within is inescapable. Arguably this instinct is somewhat less relevant than in most of human history due to the size of the existing population and the fact that social interaction is less critical to physical survival now (we'll leave mental health questions out of this.) But the instinct is still there - large scale attacks on humans by humans are a serious problem.
Plus, the existence of large scale nuclear weapons gives an intellectual validity to this discussion. In the wrong hands such a weapon could kill very very large numbers of people. Nature acts at random. A focused attack has the potential to be far more deadly, given sufficient tools.
About false sense or fear of safety devices: I believe in safety devices, do not get me wrong, it is just a selection, based on experience (mine or others), that tell me that I trust a 5-point better than any bubble that explodes in front of my face.
...
.... I am sure the force would knock you unconcious, but I bet you have a 80% + higher survival rate in a caged car, than in your airbagged Hyunday...
I trust a strong harness, bolted to the floor better, than some fancy electronics, that ignite in front of my eyes, because harnesses do not fail, electronics do.
I do not think the airbags kill people, but they burn people, and they pose a risk when you are wearing glasses (here you wear sunglasses almost every day, year round, otherwise you do not see anything)
I have been in 2 totalled cars, one that bursted into flames, one that had the engine sitting inside the passanger compartment, while the wheels were up in front of the windshield, both I survived, both without airbags, one without a seatbelt (at that time we did not have seatbelts on the back seats).
Being foolish for a rollcage or RWD?
You are right, racing conditions are different, but as soon as you take it to the highway, and as soon as you take it to the curvy mountain roads, it immediately becomes similar. On these, a rollcage, and a body tensioning (partly by the rollcage, partly by the strut bars and braces) WILL make your car more rigid, more controllable, and less likely to loose a wheel or a roof when you accidentally fly off the road, or in case you flip your car.
RWD: you can argue on that all you want, here is what I think: an RWD vehicle oversteers if you apply too much power. If you can control it, you make a drift, and you are still on the road. On a FWD vehicle, applying too much power, you lose traction to the steering wheel and it is a lot more dangerous, as you go OFF the road, instead of going to the inner line. Yes, when starting, you have a momentum of advantage on an FWD, bc the weight and the driven wheel is on the front, but as you speed up, the weight shifts to the back and your advantage is gone. I have 2 1.8 engine vehicles, one FWD one RWD, more or less the same power and weight, and I can tell you, that when accelerating, the FWD loses traction way easyer.
Quality wehicles (in my perspective) are sticking to RWD (e.g. BMW, Mercedes), or use 4wd, while most of the others shifted to FWD, not because it is good for you, but because they can save on assembly time and complexity. You also save parts, oh well, they also save parts, while the wehicle costs the same with your "added driveability".
Skull, airbag:
Yep I agree on that, that stopping your body poses danger (I saw a women with 4 broken ribs in one of the accidents, caused by the seatbelt and it did not look nice.....
I also agree that it is nice to see your car panels sliding into each other and taking away the force of the crash, slowing down, but you never see a comparison between the effects on a bus hitting your street car, and a rollcaged car from the side with 70KM/h
but explain this to me than (not picking a fight, really want your opinion):
how comes, that racedrivers walk away from 120Km/h + crashes, with their rollcage and 5point, while people die in 80km/h - crashes in street vehicles, sometimes with airbags....
But then again, this is an opinion based on driving and crash experiences and I am not forcing anything on you. You dislike it, go ahead and put 6 airbags in your FWD car and enjoy it. Here where I drive on the weekends is more like a racetrack with mountain roads and crazy drivers, and there is no snow at all, so I stick with my FWD, and keep wishing that putting a cage was simpler to deal with local regulations. And yes after driving an FWD for 4 years I am back on a RWD and I am just lowing it and feel safer.
ps: if you still do not believe me that I am safety aware: I always use motocross boots, helmet, gloves and goggles,
Implies the author knows that an answer can probably be found on Google but was either away from a computer, too lazy to look it up, or wanted timely personal responses rather than trying to stumble upon the right web page.
Alternatively, and as above, can be used to imply that the reader can't use Google to find the answer.
Both usages show how dependent people have become on Google and the internet to which it points to answer questions.
As a nation, we would likely have more people alive today than we do had we responded to the WTC attack by literally doing nothing at all (on a domestic level).
Cranking up airport security and raising costs has resulted in shifting more poeople from airplane travel to using roads or rails, all of which are less safe per passenger-mile.
This is about risk. Whether people are killed accidentally or on purpose, the risk is the same. Okay, so having the perpetrators uncaptured increases the risk somewhat, but still nowhere near enough to tip the scales compared with, say, drunk driving.
TV warps the mind. That and witnessing other people's reactions. How many people remember the exact date of the Oklahoma City bombing that destroyed the federal building? It was very similar the bombing of the towers. However, it left the news relatively fast when compared to the towers and didn't start any wars.
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Even if he were dead, it would serve the interests of some politicians to keep him "alive" for his effect on public opinion.
This is dangerously close to the stupid Madeleine Albright's conspiracy theory. It would be a shame for Schneier to tarnish his reputation by spreading such idiocy.
"I trust a strong harness, bolted to the floor better, than some fancy electronics, that ignite in front of my eyes, because harnesses do not fail, electronics do."
And therein lies the fault. You are trusting your instinct rather than actual statistics. This is like all the Americans who buy huge trucks because it makes them feel their family is safer. So while it would be more survivable in a collision with a smaller vehicle, it's far more likely than a car to get into an accident by itself, not to mention the fact that the members of their family are far less safe when not inside the truck (small children are often run over in driveways because trucks are so big and have poor visibility).
Similarly, your anecdote about racecar drivers walking away from high-speed crashes and passenger car drivers dieing in low-speed crashes. That completely neglects the fact that racecar drivers also die in low-speed crashes and passenger car drivers frequently walk away from high-speed crashes. Also, you only ever learn of the fact that they walked away, but never of any internal injuries. Not to mention the fact that those race crashes probably almost always involve lots of tumbling of the car to dissipate energy. Passenger cars are rarely ever in that category of crash. The sudden decelleration of hitting a wall at 120km/h is going to kill anybody regardless of the restraints, but fortunately race cars rarely hit walls head-on.
Something you have to remember is the law of unintended consequences. When you put a tubular steel roll cage in your car, you're adding significant weight. This will make it more difficult to turn and more difficult to stop, causing a certain number of accidents. Considering the extreme unlikeliness of crashes on open roads where a roll cage would save your life, the few additional crashes that would be caused weight wouldn't make it worthwhile. Putting 5-point restraints would cause a similar problem because far more people would be killed by neglect due to the hassle of using them than would be saved by remembering to use them.
I've noticed that it's not uncommon for emergency responders to actually be against restraint systems like airbags and seatbelts because they see so many injuries caused by them. What they tend to not realize is that the injuries that would result from not using them. The injuries sustained from airbags are generally minor. The injuries sustained from not using an airbag (face implanted in the steering wheel in the case of standard restraints or severe whiplash in the case of right restraints) are often far worse, and many times fatal.
Back when protective helmets were first introduced in combat (WWI), many people thought they were causing head injuries. Really, it was just that surgeons were seeing head injuries like fractured skulls that they never saw before because without a helmet those patients would have never been brought before a surgeon (since they'd be dead). It seems that seatbelts and airbags have suffered similar fates.
dom
Thanks -- I wasn't remembering the 9/11 figures correctly (some of the early death-toll figures you heard were much larger), which perhaps not concidentally, is something Bruce Schneier was saying: "The final death toll from 9/11 was less than half of the initial estimates, but that didn't make people feel less at risk."
Just to pick an obvious "oversight", consider the light truck emissions loophole that the SUV (not to mention the Hummer) has been driven through for around a decade. Everyone who buys these things claims that they're doing it because they're "safer" (for the driver), but anyone who knows anything about the subject knows that this just isn't true... however they are far more dangerous to people who are outside of the vehicle.
Another point: if you judge by rents, housing prices, and tourist dollars, the most popular cities in the country are ones that were built before the post-WWII car mania kicked-in. So we should build more places like this, yes? But it is actually illegal to do so: zoning regulations across the United States are tailored to the notion that traveling around in cars is the natural order of things. Hacking some sort of public transportation system into places that have built like this is nearly hopeless: things are too difuse, spread-out, etc. This is the infamous "sprawl" that people complain about often, but never do anything about.
Just on a personal level, consider the factoid: "Driving is the most dangerous thing that most people do." Everyone knows that, right? So the next logical step would be to look for ways to do less driving, e.g. live closer to work, try to live somewhere that has real public transit, look into using a bicycle, demand that your local government make it possible to use a bicycle, and so on. Is this a big concern in your life? If not, then why are you bothering to worry about outliers like "terrorist attack"?
While he makes a valid point about how we remember the deliberate attacks more vivedly I'm not sure it's a fair example considering that in this case the name of the event IS the date :)
I stole this Sig
4x10^-9 > Bush
This is a pretty logical phenomenon. With natural "accidents," we have already understood and accepted their nature. The probability of a natural disaster occuring is steady and unchanging, so if one happens, that doesn't change our expectation about more happening. As for man-made "accidents," these are correlated, so if one happens, it affects our perception of the probability that another will happen. This change in conditional probabilities can be perceived as information, and so it is the information that we are reacting to; it is the information that inflates our concern and expectations about danger, because we are risk averse and hedge against new, unknown situations.
Didn't communicate that too well, but maybe someone can tease out the reasoning a little.
Most of us haven't lost our virginity yet.
As a prelude to this, let me state that I obey the posted speed limits.
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Eisenhower in fact nationalized the highway system; however, that was not my point.
A previous poster in this thread correctly identified my point, which is that the Federal government uses coercive tactics- specifically, the threat to withold distributing Highway funds collected from the states to a particular state, if some subset of laws in a given set of laws is not passed within the state. On top of this, there's a compact between the states called "The Driver's License Compact", in which the states are legally bound to normalize laws between member states as much as possible. So you get things like a motorcycle helmet law in all compact stats, or a uniform speed limit.
Now in the nationalization process in the 1950's, there were a number of things which happened simultaneously; one was the standardization of lane widths, weight capacity, and overpass clearances for "Mobile Nuclear Command Posts" to be able to tracvel to anywhere in the U.S. over the Federal Highway Sytem. Another was engineering minimum speed capability for the Federal Highways: all such highways are required to support vehicles moving *at least* a minimum set speed (initially, 60 MPH) to control maximum time from incident to response, so there are engineering requirements on grade on curves, lengths of curves, bridge carrying capacity, etc., etc., for Federal Highways. At the same time, a funding requirement for a state law was imposed called the "Basic Speed Law" (that's it's name in California, Montanna, and Utah; other states call it other titles).
It's actually possible to successfully appeal speeding tickets on Federal Highways on the basis of the combination of these engineering constraints and the Basic Speed Law, assuming no other road conditions made it unsafe. You can do the same thing for State Highways, but you have to be very careful, since it varies from state to state as to the requirements for a highway engineering survey (for example, in California, if one has not been performed in the 5 years preceeding a drop in a speed limit, you can get the ticket thrown).
So while there is no explicit loss of sovereignty, there is in fact a coercive loss of sovereignty to Federal authority.
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As to your second statement, recklessness is a measure of degree of liability for an adverse result. Without an adverse result, there is no liability, and therefore no recklessness.
I think the situation you are talking about is more or less covered by laws against creating a public uisance (which is why those laws exist).
Personally, I consider it prosecutorial misconduct to file all the charges one possibly can construct a theory for filing against someone for a single violation or incident/crime, in the hopes that something will stick so you can "get the bastard".
As an example, "following too closely" is generally an add-on ticket that's thrown out there to make the initial ticket seem more worthy/severe; most states do not define in law what constitutes "too closely". The reason for this is that "too closely" is generally a matter of both the laws of physics, and the perceptions of the person being followed. There are rules of thumb, such as "two car lengths" (how many cubits in a car length?!?), which ignore rate of travel, and there are rules of tumb such as "the two second rule" (Utah statue without attached penalty) or "the two to three second rule" (DMV driver's handbook rule of thumb in California), but all of them have the problem that they ignore accelleration/decelleration of the following/followed car.
The only really valid codification would be a time interval or distance based on the following driver's measures reaction time, and differential speed and acceleration for the vehicles - a set of curves with a constant bias, which, if they crossed, would indicate a violation had taken place. You'd also have to take into account the followed driver's perception, which would resu
I was within earshot of the Pentagon on 9/11, so it's not so surprising I remember that date a little better than the Tsunami, which happened a little farther from home.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
yep, you are right:
....
A steel tube will make my car not move (or some cars??) , a 5 point is not good because (other) people are lazy to put it on, and people are so stupid that they do not realize that safety devices make them survive accidents. Almost forgot: it is better to walk away with internal/neck/spine problems and go to the doctor, than dying in a crushed steel ball, surrounded with airbags.
As I said, you do not have to agree, but IMO a rollcage protects you against a lot, a 5 point is better than a 3 point (it is padded too usually), a racing seat holds you better into place (sideways too), and a RWD will most likely stay on the road while an FWD will fly OFF.
And yes, you do not need all this if you drive 50km/h in your city, but you are better off with these if you drive 200+ kilometers on mountain roads on the weekends......
And no, maybe "americans" (??) think that the big SUV will be more safe, and then they flip over in 2 seconds, but then again, get into a Mini or a Mazda Miata, and have a crash from a Grand Cherokee, and your head will fly away, while the Jeep owner's wouldn't realize that they just had a crash
Rollcage weight: a meter of standard material is around 0.5K/meter. How many meters do you want to put into the car? Seriously, I've read that a completed rollcage for an AE86 (needs serious stiffening) is around 60LBS/30Kg.
That is barely the weight of a child passenger, and any car rated for 5/4 passengers with 2 persons+rollcage weight would not exceed half the capacity. Assuming no one is sitting in the back, but in my car no one sits in the back ever, except my dogs (40kg/piece average)...
but then again, I do not have a roll bar nor a racing car, but if it was easier with authorities, I would seriously consider putting one.