Honestly, in many cases the rankings / ranges are the opposite what I assumed. Considering the US is recognized as having a high number of car-drivers (perhaps too many) and low number of public-transportation-users (perhaps too few)... I assumed we'd be way up there just due to us constantly driving into eachother.
Not that we're particularly low, but we're a lot less than some countries I would assume would have less than us (per capita)
Well, substandard driver training and reasonably enforced rules is still safer than no driver training and no rules.
Good question. The one guy that drives there hasn't died in an accident yet. But on the other hand they probably have three guys following him around recording his mileage, where he goes, who he talks to, etc.
Normalizing for population doesn't make any sense at all. That would mean that even if you never entered a vehicle in your entire life, you would still have a 11.4 in 100,000 chance of dying in a car accident. That makes no sense. On the other hand, if you have a 1.1 chance of dying in 100,000 miles driven, then if you don't ever enter a vehicle, you have no chance of dying in a vehicle.
To put it another way, if you had a fictional country with 1 billion people and only 10 of those people were allowed to drive and all 10 of them died in a car accident, then by the statistics on this web page, that country would be the safest one in the world because only 10 out of a billion people died in a car accident. Ridiculous.
Also, I am not sure if this is the case in India, but in some of the Central American countries I have visited the authorities are not even called for rural traffic deaths. They just take the body and bury it. The government in many cases never knew the person was alive, so they don't care if the person died.
Also, I have to think that mileage is an estimate as well. At least in the U.S., we have traffic sensors in a lot of the highways, but secondary roads is just a guess. They haven't started tapping our GPSes yet. In third world countries, I wonder if they really have any clue how many miles are driven.
more people driving vs public transport...
It is true that in the United States most public transport deaths were due to boredom or old age rather than a traffic accident. Where I live, I would not be physically able to leave my house in the morning and get to work at the time I am supposed to be there (8:30).
I used to live in Chicago, which has a much better public transportation system. There, I was able to get up at 5:30 in the morning and make it to work on time via a 10 minute walk, a 50 minute bus ride, a 45 minute train ride and another 10 minute walk. Or I could drive, in which case, it was a 40 minute drive and a 10 minute walk.
So every one in one thousand dies on the job. I'd say that's a pretty high mortality rate for the US.
Yes, it would make this job the third most dangerous after fishing and logging, although for some reason, tower worker didn't make the list. Of course last year, there was only one death according to the article. 10,000 workers is not a very high number and the numbers of deaths bouncing from 1 one year to 18 another year means that, as expected for such a small ratio, the standard deviation is going to be huge and one cannot cite on particular years statistics as a meaningful indicator.
The towers themselves suck mightily too. I remember a video where a guy was climbing a tower and after the ladder ran out, he was basically just climbing up the crossbeams. He had a belt and clips, but in most places there wasn't anything to clip onto, so he just freeclimbed with no backup.
Many people just haven't learned that there are better ways to get out of NJ.
Such as? The surface streets don't go one direction for more than a couple of hundred feet at a time. And if you took the parkway, you'd go broke. Your best bet is probably to jump in the water and hope the current takes you out to sea.
Or the poles that hold up the wires in third world countries where they don't put communication lines in the ground?
The poles that hold up the wires in countries where they were smart enough to do a cost-benefit analysis and realized that underground wiring only resulted in 50% fewer outages, while costing 4 to 6 times as much to install and repair.
I'd be more interesting to see how it fares in the "submerged in water" test.
I'm not sure if the batteries require an air source, as a gasoline engine would, but it seems possible that the vehicle would work underwater. Unlike what you might think, electric components in a regular car don't instantly stop working underwater. In fact, power windows and headlights will probably still work underwater for awhile.
The RVers I know just buy their 20lb tanks when they get somewhere they plan to be for a while.
I know literally zero RVers that don't carry their propane with them. 30 years ago you weren't allowed to have your tanks hooked up while driving. Now, it is just fine and you can even have propane appliances running while driving.
Why the U2 was a bitch to fly: The difference between the stall speed and VNE on a U2 was 29 miles per hour. On most aircraft it's usually at least 100 miles per hour (a 747 has a stall speed of about 120 miles per hour, and a max speed (VNE) over 600 miles per hour, so the difference is more than 455 miles per hour). In a U2, there is little room to "accelerate to get away from the missile" --if you are doing 1 mile per hour faster than the stall speed, you can safely go 28 miles per hour faster.
The 747 has the same characteristics if you go high enough. See "Coffin Corner". As altitude increases in any aircraft, the stall speed approaches the maximum maneuvering speed.
It's about 400 miles. If it costs you $200, you might want to trade in your bus, RV or 18 wheeler for a more economical vehicle. Maybe you meant round trip, but I don't think the airline ticket was round trip.
I'm not sure where, if anywhere, this would fall under FAA rules, but I would bet that it works out that you can;t fly it period outside of model airplane or model rocketry areas.
Oh, yes. If only militias were illegal, then McVeigh would have never bombed the Murrah building. No militia had anything to do with that bombing. It was two nutbags who deserve to die a thousand deaths each.
when the Obama administration correctly noted that the biggest terrorism threat in the US is from *extreme* rightwing militias, that created an uproar.
Rightwing militias are the biggest threat against the direction our government is going, that is certainly a true statement. But for this reason, I think it is a horrible idea to disarm them.
If 70 percent of crimes are being performed by one racial group, by targeting them, you are automatically allowing 30 percent to go untargeted.
Not necessarily. Maybe they are focusing 70% of their attention on one racial group. Then it is nice and fair. The only downside is that by focusing 30% of your effort on races that commit fewer crimes, you will statistically prevent less crime.
Education, environment and economic opportunities are excuses. One still has the opportunity and the responsibility to better oneself. I grew up in a lower income neighborhood and spent time in inner city schools and schools where minorities made up 90% of the population. I didn't have a parent at home that could help me with homework, my parents were divorced, my series of stepfathers didn't care for anything other than hitting and yelling, and my mother worked all the time and couldn't cook for us or help us with homework. I never joined a gang. I didn't hang out with people in gangs. I hung out with other people who were making the best of a bad situation. I finished school with a 3.2 and went to college and graduated with a degree in engineering. I didn't even really put forth a lot of effort inn high school OR college really. In fact, I had some serious senioritis in college, but I still finished high enough to be in the engineering honor society.
Yes, some people have it worse than me, but a lot of people had it better and still use their environment as an excuse. You have to take responsibility for yourself and make something of yourself.
I presume you are not in a race where you are suspected and targeted for increased frisking not because you actually look suspicious, or because you fit the description of someone who was at the scene of a crime, but just because the color of your skin.
Seems like the color of your skin might have some relationship to fitting the description of someone who was at the scene of the crime. But of course, it is not all about race. Put a white kid in some baggy pants showing his underwear and a hoodie and a black guy in some slacks and a polo, and guess which one is going to attract the attention of law enforcement?
Yes, we tend to judge a book by a cover, unless of course we have had an opportunity to read the book. It's kept us alive for millions of years, and it is hard to override millions of years of pattern recognition development with only a couple of decades of political correctness training.
Instead of trying to get people to change their preconceived notions, perhaps we should look at proving the preconceived notions wrong. If our prejudices prove wrong, then we will change.
It's true that you can never say that you permitted a crime. The TSA can't say they have prevented any terrorist acts because you can never know if a potential plot would have gone through, been foiled in some other matter, utterly failed, or if it was just big talk that nobody would have ever actually done anything about. You can never prove that a gun owner prevented a mass murder because you can never know if he would have gone through with it if the gun owner hadn't shot him. You can never tell if taking a gun from a gang member would have prevented a murder because you never know if the gang member would have ever shot anybody.
It's an ethical dilemma to be sure. Do you wait until they kill someone before you arrest them? Or do you intrude on their lives and take away a gun they shouldn't have had just in case they might have used it violently at some point?
The same places you're most likely to be terry frisked are also the places where you're most likely to be shot (as guns account for the majority of homicides there).
There must be some mistake. When you make guns illegal, there shouldn't be any gun violence at all. I'm sure the criminals were first in line to turn in their guns when NYC made them illegal.
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Honestly, in many cases the rankings / ranges are the opposite what I assumed. Considering the US is recognized as having a high number of car-drivers (perhaps too many) and low number of public-transportation-users (perhaps too few)... I assumed we'd be way up there just due to us constantly driving into eachother.
Not that we're particularly low, but we're a lot less than some countries I would assume would have less than us (per capita)
Well, substandard driver training and reasonably enforced rules is still safer than no driver training and no rules.
How did they manage to get data from North Korea?
Good question. The one guy that drives there hasn't died in an accident yet. But on the other hand they probably have three guys following him around recording his mileage, where he goes, who he talks to, etc.
Normalizing for population doesn't make any sense at all. That would mean that even if you never entered a vehicle in your entire life, you would still have a 11.4 in 100,000 chance of dying in a car accident. That makes no sense. On the other hand, if you have a 1.1 chance of dying in 100,000 miles driven, then if you don't ever enter a vehicle, you have no chance of dying in a vehicle.
To put it another way, if you had a fictional country with 1 billion people and only 10 of those people were allowed to drive and all 10 of them died in a car accident, then by the statistics on this web page, that country would be the safest one in the world because only 10 out of a billion people died in a car accident. Ridiculous.
Also, I am not sure if this is the case in India, but in some of the Central American countries I have visited the authorities are not even called for rural traffic deaths. They just take the body and bury it. The government in many cases never knew the person was alive, so they don't care if the person died.
Also, I have to think that mileage is an estimate as well. At least in the U.S., we have traffic sensors in a lot of the highways, but secondary roads is just a guess. They haven't started tapping our GPSes yet. In third world countries, I wonder if they really have any clue how many miles are driven.
more people driving vs public transport...
It is true that in the United States most public transport deaths were due to boredom or old age rather than a traffic accident. Where I live, I would not be physically able to leave my house in the morning and get to work at the time I am supposed to be there (8:30).
I used to live in Chicago, which has a much better public transportation system. There, I was able to get up at 5:30 in the morning and make it to work on time via a 10 minute walk, a 50 minute bus ride, a 45 minute train ride and another 10 minute walk. Or I could drive, in which case, it was a 40 minute drive and a 10 minute walk.
So every one in one thousand dies on the job. I'd say that's a pretty high mortality rate for the US.
Yes, it would make this job the third most dangerous after fishing and logging, although for some reason, tower worker didn't make the list. Of course last year, there was only one death according to the article. 10,000 workers is not a very high number and the numbers of deaths bouncing from 1 one year to 18 another year means that, as expected for such a small ratio, the standard deviation is going to be huge and one cannot cite on particular years statistics as a meaningful indicator.
The towers themselves suck mightily too. I remember a video where a guy was climbing a tower and after the ladder ran out, he was basically just climbing up the crossbeams. He had a belt and clips, but in most places there wasn't anything to clip onto, so he just freeclimbed with no backup.
Many people just haven't learned that there are better ways to get out of NJ.
Such as? The surface streets don't go one direction for more than a couple of hundred feet at a time. And if you took the parkway, you'd go broke. Your best bet is probably to jump in the water and hope the current takes you out to sea.
Or the poles that hold up the wires in third world countries where they don't put communication lines in the ground?
The poles that hold up the wires in countries where they were smart enough to do a cost-benefit analysis and realized that underground wiring only resulted in 50% fewer outages, while costing 4 to 6 times as much to install and repair.
What is the condition where a person thinks a word has a different meaning because it sounds like something totally unrelated?
Homonymic?
In most parts of the United States, $100k is insufficient to support any offspring.
I'd be more interesting to see how it fares in the "submerged in water" test.
I'm not sure if the batteries require an air source, as a gasoline engine would, but it seems possible that the vehicle would work underwater. Unlike what you might think, electric components in a regular car don't instantly stop working underwater. In fact, power windows and headlights will probably still work underwater for awhile.
Not artificially high? How come North American cars don't have amber turn signals then?
They are amber, you just can't tell because nobody uses them. They just give you a gentle nudge to tell you they are changing lanes.
The RVers I know just buy their 20lb tanks when they get somewhere they plan to be for a while.
I know literally zero RVers that don't carry their propane with them. 30 years ago you weren't allowed to have your tanks hooked up while driving. Now, it is just fine and you can even have propane appliances running while driving.
Why the U2 was a bitch to fly: The difference between the stall speed and VNE on a U2 was 29 miles per hour. On most aircraft it's usually at least 100 miles per hour (a 747 has a stall speed of about 120 miles per hour, and a max speed (VNE) over 600 miles per hour, so the difference is more than 455 miles per hour). In a U2, there is little room to "accelerate to get away from the missile" --if you are doing 1 mile per hour faster than the stall speed, you can safely go 28 miles per hour faster.
The 747 has the same characteristics if you go high enough. See "Coffin Corner". As altitude increases in any aircraft, the stall speed approaches the maximum maneuvering speed.
It costs $200 to drive on fuel alone.
It's about 400 miles. If it costs you $200, you might want to trade in your bus, RV or 18 wheeler for a more economical vehicle. Maybe you meant round trip, but I don't think the airline ticket was round trip.
I'm not sure where, if anywhere, this would fall under FAA rules, but I would bet that it works out that you can;t fly it period outside of model airplane or model rocketry areas.
And most of you voted for him. I hope you are proud of yourselves.
Nope, most people voted that they don't want either one of the two major candidates or any of the independents either.
Oh, yes. If only militias were illegal, then McVeigh would have never bombed the Murrah building. No militia had anything to do with that bombing. It was two nutbags who deserve to die a thousand deaths each.
when the Obama administration correctly noted that the biggest terrorism threat in the US is from *extreme* rightwing militias, that created an uproar.
Rightwing militias are the biggest threat against the direction our government is going, that is certainly a true statement. But for this reason, I think it is a horrible idea to disarm them.
If 70 percent of crimes are being performed by one racial group, by targeting them, you are automatically allowing 30 percent to go untargeted.
Not necessarily. Maybe they are focusing 70% of their attention on one racial group. Then it is nice and fair. The only downside is that by focusing 30% of your effort on races that commit fewer crimes, you will statistically prevent less crime.
Education, environment and economic opportunities are excuses. One still has the opportunity and the responsibility to better oneself. I grew up in a lower income neighborhood and spent time in inner city schools and schools where minorities made up 90% of the population. I didn't have a parent at home that could help me with homework, my parents were divorced, my series of stepfathers didn't care for anything other than hitting and yelling, and my mother worked all the time and couldn't cook for us or help us with homework. I never joined a gang. I didn't hang out with people in gangs. I hung out with other people who were making the best of a bad situation. I finished school with a 3.2 and went to college and graduated with a degree in engineering. I didn't even really put forth a lot of effort inn high school OR college really. In fact, I had some serious senioritis in college, but I still finished high enough to be in the engineering honor society.
Yes, some people have it worse than me, but a lot of people had it better and still use their environment as an excuse. You have to take responsibility for yourself and make something of yourself.
I presume you are not in a race where you are suspected and targeted for increased frisking not because you actually look suspicious, or because you fit the description of someone who was at the scene of a crime, but just because the color of your skin.
Seems like the color of your skin might have some relationship to fitting the description of someone who was at the scene of the crime. But of course, it is not all about race. Put a white kid in some baggy pants showing his underwear and a hoodie and a black guy in some slacks and a polo, and guess which one is going to attract the attention of law enforcement?
Yes, we tend to judge a book by a cover, unless of course we have had an opportunity to read the book. It's kept us alive for millions of years, and it is hard to override millions of years of pattern recognition development with only a couple of decades of political correctness training.
Instead of trying to get people to change their preconceived notions, perhaps we should look at proving the preconceived notions wrong. If our prejudices prove wrong, then we will change.
It's true that you can never say that you permitted a crime. The TSA can't say they have prevented any terrorist acts because you can never know if a potential plot would have gone through, been foiled in some other matter, utterly failed, or if it was just big talk that nobody would have ever actually done anything about. You can never prove that a gun owner prevented a mass murder because you can never know if he would have gone through with it if the gun owner hadn't shot him. You can never tell if taking a gun from a gang member would have prevented a murder because you never know if the gang member would have ever shot anybody.
It's an ethical dilemma to be sure. Do you wait until they kill someone before you arrest them? Or do you intrude on their lives and take away a gun they shouldn't have had just in case they might have used it violently at some point?
The same places you're most likely to be terry frisked are also the places where you're most likely to be shot (as guns account for the majority of homicides there).
There must be some mistake. When you make guns illegal, there shouldn't be any gun violence at all. I'm sure the criminals were first in line to turn in their guns when NYC made them illegal.