It's a funny distribution. A lot of us live quite densely -- at least 1/3 of the population lives in 2000ppl/sq. mi. density, and I say at least because those are the lumps of people in census areas with more than 50k population (so I'm not counted, even though my town is 4000 ppl/sq. mi.).
AND -- given that the density around here, and the population, are both on the order of, and more so, than Groningen in the Netherlands, where most trips are by bicycle -- not even "small car". So we have the same density, similar climate, we're mostly flat around here too, yet we have nowhere near the ride share. If it were merely a question of density, we'd have a 50+% bike trip share here, and we surely do not. Instead, we have monster trucks, SUVs, and minivans out the kazoo.
Lack of nearby stores, as others have noted, is stupid zoning, not a law of nature.
Small cars do fine in snow, and they do fine in mud. I learned to drive in a Saab 96, in an orange grove, half a mile from pavement ("rural", I think). Saabs come from Sweden. It snows there. They did well in rallies and in ice racing, and they were fun in the mud, too. They were also a little car. You could stuff them pretty full, and they also made a station wagon (Saab 95) that would seat 7, though the last two were cramped.
I do agree that we don't take kindly to being told what to buy; however, sooner or later gasoline is likely to get expensive, and then people will buy differently (and we should have been paying a $.70/gallon surcharge to fund the Iraq war, for quite a few years). If the people living in the boonies had any sense, they would be really gung-ho for places in the US that are as dense as the Dutch, to do transportation like the Dutch, so that there'd be less demand for fuel and lower prices. When you hear about more bike lanes in NYC, you should not be sympathetic for the poor oppressed city-SUV drivers who have less pavement for their land yachts, you should be thinking, "hah-hah, more for me!"
Or -- don't use cars; bikes and mass transit are adequate for many trips. Not all, but many.
Or -- why don't our "smart" cars arrange our car-pools for us? It's hard to get 100mpg, but stuffing two people into a 50mpg car is something we can pretty much manage right now.
Really? I look at what I do in my spare time, I am damn sure not getting paid to do it, and I do it anyway. For example, tonight I tried (and failed) to fit a snowplow onto my bike (it's a cargo bike, there's an easy fitting in the back). Nobody's paying me. The light on my bicycle, my design, nobody paid me (you can't buy one like it, either). Friends tell me I should try to sell it, but who has the time, I have a job, too.
I want a lot more out of life than just food.
Note, also, that there is a huge difference between guaranteed minimum income, and the old Russian or Chinese systems. If the basic system is market driven, you'll get market behavior, even though people don't need to work for all of their money. If it's command-and-control with silly-ass state ownership of the means of production, we tried that experiment, it sucked. But what is proposed, is not what you claim it is, nor do we know that it inevitably leads to that, either.
Depends upon the circumstances; could be that they view the north as the most likely instigator, and this is intended to discourage them. If it were us instead, things might be different.
Whoa, cool. I had no idea. Wikipedia missed one use -- if you want to get the most intense turquoise from procion dyes (tie-dye, often), you use Glauber's salt instead of salt when mixing the dye (note that the referenced site sells anhydrous sodium sulfate, not the deca-hydrated form you were thinking of).
Note that the study you cite speaks only of bias, and says nothing about misinformation:
Most important, the definition has nothing to do with the honesty or accuracy of the news outlet. Instead, our notion is more like a taste or preference.
Problem, however, is that this is not the only paper published on the subject. Some suggest downward adjustments to the model, some suggest upward adjustments to the model. Not sure what the latest from the IPCC says, but there was recent one discussing sea level rise, where they mentioned in a footnote "not counting any effects from Greenland melt, because we don't understand that yet". The official predictions are very conservative. Combining a conservative official prediction, with one paper's proposed adjustment to effects, does not necessarily yield a very good (likely to be true) prediction. The uncertainty of "maybe we'll discover mitigating stuff" is already somewhat baked in to the conservative prediction.
The thing to keep an eye on is the nearer term predictions -- as long as we don't have an ocean-overturn anoxia horror (which models now say is not very likely -- and how much do we trust models again?) anything happening on the scale of centuries, we'll cope (I direct your attention to population movements in the US since 1910). However, some predictions suggest that we'll see, in the next few decades, repeated and severe droughts in the middle of the US, where we grow a lot of food. That would suck, but the timing and severity, if it happens, help us calibrate our trust in the rest of the models. Something similar is predicted for parts of the Mediterranean, especially southern Spain.
The economy is hardly threatened. I'll try to list the reasons why I think so:
1) Europe generally has a much smaller per capita GHG footprint than the US, yet their economies are doing just fine (this is especially true of chocolate-making countries). Note that they do this with hydro, nukes, and also with high fuel taxes. (Caveat: GHG "imports" and "exports" -- but if you ding them for the GHG embodied by their imports from us, we get dinged by the GHG from our imports from China.)
2) There are at least two things we could do that would chop our GHG footprint that are hardly economy-destroying -- drive smaller cars, and eat much less beef and pork. 4 legs bad, 2 wings good.
3) The carbon taxes I've seen proposed are relatively small -- enough to motivate industry, but within the range of price fluctuations we've seen for fossil fuel. An example is $40/ ton of CO2 (CO2-equivalent, if you consider methane and nitrous oxides). CO2-ton = roughly 100 gallons of burned gasoline, so $.40/gallon. We'd notice a price jump like that, but it would still be lower than recent price spikes. For comparison, the money we spend/spent (borrowed) on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, was in the ballpark of $.70/gallon.
4) There's at least one economically neutral driving-disincentive out there that we could deploy; pay-per-mile auto insurance. The first is a simple economic efficiency -- by buying your insurance per-mile instead of per-year, you obtain the ability to save more money by not driving (the price is nowhere near linear per mile, but this does not reflect actual risk) . I can't convince myself that congestion pricing is also economically neutral, since it is creates a market for one kind of driving (uncongested) by excluding the other kind of driving (congested), but it also discourages driving.
5) We're resistant to somewhat more gung-ho measures, like using bicycles more, because "we're not a dense country". Oddly enough, despite this lack of density there's also "no room for bicycle infrastructure". In fact, many (at least 1/3 of the population, I can't get a perfect answer from census data, but I can get a lower bound) lives in densities of 2000/sq mile or higher. 1/3 of us already live in places where we could drive far less, if we bothered to convert some of our infrastructure away from automobiles. Before-and-after experience in the Netherlands suggests that this is not economy-destroying -- you can cram many more people into a space if they arrive on bicycles (or busses, or trains, or a combination) than if they arrive in cars. More people = more economic activity. The goal here is not one-size-fits-all, "New York is dense, so you can bicycle across Montana" transit planning (that would be stupid), but to steal what works in other countries, and use it where it is appropriate.
6) Improved building codes. Again, steal from Europe. Houses can hold heat better than they do. We're doing better now than we did, but we could do better yet, and the expenses (compared to property, and labor costs of construction) are not that large. Kind of a shame we just had a building boom under the less efficient building codes.
No, no, you're supposed to SMITE (damn, did that without capslock, just now noticed) the users. Don't smite them, they start to get all uppity, filing bug reports about crappy UI and stuff like that. It's a privilege to use that software, you should be grateful they wrote it.
Seems like the capitalization of keywords could be automated. Seriously "let's write a style checker, to reject code with lower case keywords", versus, "let's write a filter to ensure that keywards are in upper case". One is whack-on-the-knuckles with a ruler, the other is a productivity aid.
(I hope they don't enforce this rule by human inspection, but I have this horrible fear...)
Road safety means that if I want to get from point A to point B, which method of transport is most likely to get me there alive. The study does nothing to answer this because it's completely irrelevant to it.
Except that your definition of "road safety" would have the choice always be car, not bicycle. No bicycle riding means much less exercise, puts you in the category with the much higher mortality rate. If your safety choices are not reducing your risk of death, then there's something wrong with your safety choices.
Notice that they also adjusted for level of education, and they had a diversity there, so it is unlikely to be due to choice-of-job bias. It would also be helpful if there were any commonly-held jobs with that large a bias in mortality rate (I've looked, we're talking logging and deep-sea fishing). Unless the drivers were all fisherman and loggers, that's not it. And such a distribution of occupations is highly unlikely.
I am indeed curious -- the glaringly likely explanation for what we see here, is simply that more exercise is better for your health, even for very large values of "more", and bicycle commuting makes large values possible, and this would make what was observed here cause, not correlation (your attempt at an alternate explanation was rather inadequate). Why is this not the #1 choice for an explanation of the observed effect, given that the benefits of varying levels of exercise have been documented in other studies? I mean, seriously, the guys doing the research are not idiots, they're going to be looking for weird distributions and things like that.
Now, it could be that you have a commute that makes it impractical to commute by bicycle, in which case, I guess you are stuck in that grossly-elevated mortality group, and a.5% decrease in mortality is still a decrease in mortality. In that unfortunate situation, yes, "road safety" is a local optimization, and I, too, would pursue it as a short-term effort -- but knowing that a 28% reduction was possible, I think I'd be motivated to pursue the larger improvement as well. Either move your home, move your job, agitate for improved facilities from your local government, or perhaps try an electric assist, if the issue is merely one of distance (note that the electric assist does add slightly to your crash risk, but that is still small compared to lack of exercise).
Seeing as how they did ask how people commuted to work, at least to the extent of bicycling or not, and given that they were studying mortality rates, and given that I define safety as "reduced risk of death", which is normally synonymous with a reduced mortality rate, I don't see how you reach the conclusions that you do. If you drive a car to work (in their study), you do not ride a bicycle to work. That places you in the group with the much higher mortality rate. Therefore, driving is less safe than bicycling, at least for your daily commute. It might be a bit of a stretch, but I would be willing to bet that most of the increase in mortality is caused by reduced exercise, which certainly describes driving a car, versus riding a bike.
Now, you seem to have some definition of "road safety", that is (1) related to tiny changes in overall mortality rate and (2) independent of my actual overall risk of death. Why is your definition useful or interesting?
Oh, please. This is hardly the first study to notice that exercise is good for you. It's about the only medical recommendation that hasn't been reversed, qualified, or caveat-ed in all the years I've been paying attention. You would have me believe that somehow, in a country where a large fraction of the population cycles, that there is some undefinable something, that does not show up in any of the other risk factors, that nonetheless causes people to ride their bikes, and to live longer. And that even in those cases where individuals begin cycling (or some other program of large amounts of exercise, not just self-reported "leisure time physical activity") and subsequently observe reduction in ALL the risk factors, that that, too, is coincidence, and not causal.
This is not exactly a credible position you have staked out -- a logical consequence of your position is that it's all correlation, including all the risk factors, and we have no idea what causes heart disease, stroke, or diabetes, and that all that advice to get more exercise, is also bunk.
The dramatic difference is 5x, but the risk of a serious cycling crash is not nearly as large as popularly perceived -- it just happens that it is extremely small in Northern Europe. The claim (an old bit of data from a guy at Failure Analysis Associates, impossible to track down his methods) is that per-hour, cycling and driving have about equal risk. And car crashes are still a much less significant cause of death than all the cardiovascular nastiness associated with being underactive.
Apparently, non-commuting exercise did not eliminate the difference:
"After adjustment for age, sex, and educational level, the relative risk in those who cycled was 0.70 (95% CI, 0.55-0.89). After additional adjustment for leisure time physical activity, body mass index, blood lipid levels, smoking, and blood pressure, the relative risk was 0.72 (95% CI, 0.57-0.91)."
As to your quibbles about diet, etc, I think you are being willfully ignorant. There are variations in diet everywhere, and it would show up in adjustment for risk factors (lipids, BMI, blood pressure), even in Denmark. This is hardly the first study suggesting that exercise is good for you -- what these guys are noticing, is that daily cycling amounts to a lot of exercise, and the health benefits continue to accrue. The problem with driving, and why it is "unsafe", is that it removes this exercise opportunity, and relatively few people have the time for an equivalent amount of exercise.
But are the old farts required to retake the test?
There's also the issue of the damage done to your body. Younger, I could move a mountain of wood (or some similar task), go to bed tired, and wake up not too sore, if not the next day, then the day after that. I can still do the work, but I feel it for days, maybe even a week or two.
You need to be a little careful here. A young woman can easily be better able to carry someone out of a building than a middle-aged man, and there are plenty of middle-aged firefighters. It's not just muscles, it's also joints, tendons, etc. You get to a certain point, you realize, "I could do that easily once-upon-a-time, but it's not such a good idea now".
I don't see a need for more bureaucracy, where we've been doing just fine without "signers" so far in recent years.
The whole nudie-cam thing, I am slightly more torqued off that they are using X-rays, and that the response I've seen to "why not millimeter-wave" is "but that's even more detailed!", as if we lacked the technology to defocus an image down to whatever resolution was deemed adequate with X-rays.
Using X-rays, especially at an energy that concentrates them in the skin, especially in bulk, especially with not-that-trained service personnel, adds a larger-than zero cancer risk. It's not a big risk, but it is actually there, and it's completely unnecessary, because we have an alternative. What we've got is huckster-driven security.
Something that reduces my chance of death, is safer. These guys measured death rates, and one thing they observed is that commuting by car raises your mortality rate, compared to commuting by bicycle.
(Much) Greater chance of death, therefore less safe. Dead is dead.
"this crap" is ineffective, expensive, intrusive security theater. Details have been listed much more extensively and eloquently by others, notably Bruce Schneier.
Someone's (your?) question more or less was, "why are people piling on the TSA, especially after all the other stuff (unconstitutional wiretapping, etc) that we've more or less rolled over for. Some of us (well, me), are pretty well tired of the whole war-on-terror nonsense, that has us starting wars on dubious pretenses, torturing people as an act of executive policy, performing warrantless wiretaps, "extraordinary rendition", and who knows what else I've forgotten to be mad about it. And next to all that, porn-o-vision and federal-feelups are pretty small beer, you are right. But you know what? This is getting people to finally make a fuss about the costs and the benefits, and I'll take my fuss any way I can get it.
And don't forget, they're justifying this as a solution to something that as already been solved. Hijacking into a building, unlikely to happen again, with a reinforced door and vigilant passengers (who stopped both the shoe bomber and the underpants bomber). What we're protecting against, is a plane crash. There's no point making it much harder to do that, than it would be to smuggle a Stinger surface-to-air missile in and use that from the ground. (Recall that we still have a bales-of-marijuana sized smuggling problem.) There are other choices, a friend with high-end military experience mentioned them to me, along the lines of "Damn, if I XXX YYY ZZZ I could take out 2 or 3 planes, just like that."
I'm not sure the article you reference makes your case for even one.
First, he slipped in while a flight attendant had the door open, instead of making the "open or else" threat.
Second, he said he had accomplices and explosives. The article you reference says (a) that he lied about the accomplices and (b) does not say that he actually had explosives. I could look further, but lacking further information, sounds like a bluff to me.
So much for research. Can you make a better case for greater than zero?
Actually, no. You're not necessarily free to drive your car.
You are free to walk, and perhaps to ride a bicycle (I have read that there are certain mostly-empty western states where bikes cannot legally be banned from interstate roads, because the interstate is the only route. But IANAL).
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It's a funny distribution. A lot of us live quite densely -- at least 1/3 of the population lives in 2000ppl/sq. mi. density, and I say at least because those are the lumps of people in census areas with more than 50k population (so I'm not counted, even though my town is 4000 ppl/sq. mi.).
AND -- given that the density around here, and the population, are both on the order of, and more so, than Groningen in the Netherlands, where most trips are by bicycle -- not even "small car". So we have the same density, similar climate, we're mostly flat around here too, yet we have nowhere near the ride share. If it were merely a question of density, we'd have a 50+% bike trip share here, and we surely do not. Instead, we have monster trucks, SUVs, and minivans out the kazoo.
Lack of nearby stores, as others have noted, is stupid zoning, not a law of nature.
Small cars do fine in snow, and they do fine in mud. I learned to drive in a Saab 96, in an orange grove, half a mile from pavement ("rural", I think). Saabs come from Sweden. It snows there. They did well in rallies and in ice racing, and they were fun in the mud, too. They were also a little car. You could stuff them pretty full, and they also made a station wagon (Saab 95) that would seat 7, though the last two were cramped.
I do agree that we don't take kindly to being told what to buy; however, sooner or later gasoline is likely to get expensive, and then people will buy differently (and we should have been paying a $.70/gallon surcharge to fund the Iraq war, for quite a few years). If the people living in the boonies had any sense, they would be really gung-ho for places in the US that are as dense as the Dutch, to do transportation like the Dutch, so that there'd be less demand for fuel and lower prices. When you hear about more bike lanes in NYC, you should not be sympathetic for the poor oppressed city-SUV drivers who have less pavement for their land yachts, you should be thinking, "hah-hah, more for me!"
Or -- don't use cars; bikes and mass transit are adequate for many trips. Not all, but many.
Or -- why don't our "smart" cars arrange our car-pools for us? It's hard to get 100mpg, but stuffing two people into a 50mpg car is something we can pretty much manage right now.
Really? I look at what I do in my spare time, I am damn sure not getting paid to do it, and I do it anyway. For example, tonight I tried (and failed) to fit a snowplow onto my bike (it's a cargo bike, there's an easy fitting in the back). Nobody's paying me. The light on my bicycle, my design, nobody paid me (you can't buy one like it, either). Friends tell me I should try to sell it, but who has the time, I have a job, too.
I want a lot more out of life than just food.
Note, also, that there is a huge difference between guaranteed minimum income, and the old Russian or Chinese systems. If the basic system is market driven, you'll get market behavior, even though people don't need to work for all of their money. If it's command-and-control with silly-ass state ownership of the means of production, we tried that experiment, it sucked. But what is proposed, is not what you claim it is, nor do we know that it inevitably leads to that, either.
Depends upon the circumstances; could be that they view the north as the most likely instigator, and this is intended to discourage them. If it were us instead, things might be different.
Whoa, cool. I had no idea. Wikipedia missed one use -- if you want to get the most intense turquoise from procion dyes (tie-dye, often), you use Glauber's salt instead of salt when mixing the dye (note that the referenced site sells anhydrous sodium sulfate, not the deca-hydrated form you were thinking of).
Problem, however, is that this is not the only paper published on the subject. Some suggest downward adjustments to the model, some suggest upward adjustments to the model. Not sure what the latest from the IPCC says, but there was recent one discussing sea level rise, where they mentioned in a footnote "not counting any effects from Greenland melt, because we don't understand that yet". The official predictions are very conservative. Combining a conservative official prediction, with one paper's proposed adjustment to effects, does not necessarily yield a very good (likely to be true) prediction. The uncertainty of "maybe we'll discover mitigating stuff" is already somewhat baked in to the conservative prediction.
The thing to keep an eye on is the nearer term predictions -- as long as we don't have an ocean-overturn anoxia horror (which models now say is not very likely -- and how much do we trust models again?) anything happening on the scale of centuries, we'll cope (I direct your attention to population movements in the US since 1910). However, some predictions suggest that we'll see, in the next few decades, repeated and severe droughts in the middle of the US, where we grow a lot of food. That would suck, but the timing and severity, if it happens, help us calibrate our trust in the rest of the models. Something similar is predicted for parts of the Mediterranean, especially southern Spain.
The economy is hardly threatened. I'll try to list the reasons why I think so:
1) Europe generally has a much smaller per capita GHG footprint than the US, yet their economies are doing just fine (this is especially true of chocolate-making countries). Note that they do this with hydro, nukes, and also with high fuel taxes. (Caveat: GHG "imports" and "exports" -- but if you ding them for the GHG embodied by their imports from us, we get dinged by the GHG from our imports from China.)
2) There are at least two things we could do that would chop our GHG footprint that are hardly economy-destroying -- drive smaller cars, and eat much less beef and pork. 4 legs bad, 2 wings good.
3) The carbon taxes I've seen proposed are relatively small -- enough to motivate industry, but within the range of price fluctuations we've seen for fossil fuel. An example is $40/ ton of CO2 (CO2-equivalent, if you consider methane and nitrous oxides). CO2-ton = roughly 100 gallons of burned gasoline, so $.40/gallon. We'd notice a price jump like that, but it would still be lower than recent price spikes. For comparison, the money we spend/spent (borrowed) on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, was in the ballpark of $.70/gallon.
4) There's at least one economically neutral driving-disincentive out there that we could deploy; pay-per-mile auto insurance. The first is a simple economic efficiency -- by buying your insurance per-mile instead of per-year, you obtain the ability to save more money by not driving (the price is nowhere near linear per mile, but this does not reflect actual risk) . I can't convince myself that congestion pricing is also economically neutral, since it is creates a market for one kind of driving (uncongested) by excluding the other kind of driving (congested), but it also discourages driving.
5) We're resistant to somewhat more gung-ho measures, like using bicycles more, because "we're not a dense country". Oddly enough, despite this lack of density there's also "no room for bicycle infrastructure". In fact, many (at least 1/3 of the population, I can't get a perfect answer from census data, but I can get a lower bound) lives in densities of 2000/sq mile or higher. 1/3 of us already live in places where we could drive far less, if we bothered to convert some of our infrastructure away from automobiles. Before-and-after experience in the Netherlands suggests that this is not economy-destroying -- you can cram many more people into a space if they arrive on bicycles (or busses, or trains, or a combination) than if they arrive in cars. More people = more economic activity. The goal here is not one-size-fits-all, "New York is dense, so you can bicycle across Montana" transit planning (that would be stupid), but to steal what works in other countries, and use it where it is appropriate.
6) Improved building codes. Again, steal from Europe. Houses can hold heat better than they do. We're doing better now than we did, but we could do better yet, and the expenses (compared to property, and labor costs of construction) are not that large. Kind of a shame we just had a building boom under the less efficient building codes.
No, no, you're supposed to SMITE (damn, did that without capslock, just now noticed) the users. Don't smite them, they start to get all uppity, filing bug reports about crappy UI and stuff like that. It's a privilege to use that software, you should be grateful they wrote it.
And besides, smiting is so much fun.
Seems like the capitalization of keywords could be automated. Seriously "let's write a style checker, to reject code with lower case keywords", versus, "let's write a filter to ensure that keywards are in upper case". One is whack-on-the-knuckles with a ruler, the other is a productivity aid.
(I hope they don't enforce this rule by human inspection, but I have this horrible fear...)
Road safety means that if I want to get from point A to point B, which method of transport is most likely to get me there alive. The study does nothing to answer this because it's completely irrelevant to it.
.5% decrease in mortality is still a decrease in mortality. In that unfortunate situation, yes, "road safety" is a local optimization, and I, too, would pursue it as a short-term effort -- but knowing that a 28% reduction was possible, I think I'd be motivated to pursue the larger improvement as well. Either move your home, move your job, agitate for improved facilities from your local government, or perhaps try an electric assist, if the issue is merely one of distance (note that the electric assist does add slightly to your crash risk, but that is still small compared to lack of exercise).
Except that your definition of "road safety" would have the choice always be car, not bicycle. No bicycle riding means much less exercise, puts you in the category with the much higher mortality rate. If your safety choices are not reducing your risk of death, then there's something wrong with your safety choices.
Notice that they also adjusted for level of education, and they had a diversity there, so it is unlikely to be due to choice-of-job bias. It would also be helpful if there were any commonly-held jobs with that large a bias in mortality rate (I've looked, we're talking logging and deep-sea fishing). Unless the drivers were all fisherman and loggers, that's not it. And such a distribution of occupations is highly unlikely.
I am indeed curious -- the glaringly likely explanation for what we see here, is simply that more exercise is better for your health, even for very large values of "more", and bicycle commuting makes large values possible, and this would make what was observed here cause, not correlation (your attempt at an alternate explanation was rather inadequate). Why is this not the #1 choice for an explanation of the observed effect, given that the benefits of varying levels of exercise have been documented in other studies? I mean, seriously, the guys doing the research are not idiots, they're going to be looking for weird distributions and things like that.
Now, it could be that you have a commute that makes it impractical to commute by bicycle, in which case, I guess you are stuck in that grossly-elevated mortality group, and a
Seeing as how they did ask how people commuted to work, at least to the extent of bicycling or not, and given that they were studying mortality rates, and given that I define safety as "reduced risk of death", which is normally synonymous with a reduced mortality rate, I don't see how you reach the conclusions that you do. If you drive a car to work (in their study), you do not ride a bicycle to work. That places you in the group with the much higher mortality rate. Therefore, driving is less safe than bicycling, at least for your daily commute. It might be a bit of a stretch, but I would be willing to bet that most of the increase in mortality is caused by reduced exercise, which certainly describes driving a car, versus riding a bike.
Now, you seem to have some definition of "road safety", that is (1) related to tiny changes in overall mortality rate and (2) independent of my actual overall risk of death. Why is your definition useful or interesting?
Oh, please. This is hardly the first study to notice that exercise is good for you. It's about the only medical recommendation that hasn't been reversed, qualified, or caveat-ed in all the years I've been paying attention. You would have me believe that somehow, in a country where a large fraction of the population cycles, that there is some undefinable something, that does not show up in any of the other risk factors, that nonetheless causes people to ride their bikes, and to live longer. And that even in those cases where individuals begin cycling (or some other program of large amounts of exercise, not just self-reported "leisure time physical activity") and subsequently observe reduction in ALL the risk factors, that that, too, is coincidence, and not causal.
This is not exactly a credible position you have staked out -- a logical consequence of your position is that it's all correlation, including all the risk factors, and we have no idea what causes heart disease, stroke, or diabetes, and that all that advice to get more exercise, is also bunk.
The dramatic difference is 5x, but the risk of a serious cycling crash is not nearly as large as popularly perceived -- it just happens that it is extremely small in Northern Europe. The claim (an old bit of data from a guy at Failure Analysis Associates, impossible to track down his methods) is that per-hour, cycling and driving have about equal risk. And car crashes are still a much less significant cause of death than all the cardiovascular nastiness associated with being underactive.
Apparently, non-commuting exercise did not eliminate the difference: "After adjustment for age, sex, and educational level, the relative risk in those who cycled was 0.70 (95% CI, 0.55-0.89). After additional adjustment for leisure time physical activity, body mass index, blood lipid levels, smoking, and blood pressure, the relative risk was 0.72 (95% CI, 0.57-0.91)."
As to your quibbles about diet, etc, I think you are being willfully ignorant. There are variations in diet everywhere, and it would show up in adjustment for risk factors (lipids, BMI, blood pressure), even in Denmark. This is hardly the first study suggesting that exercise is good for you -- what these guys are noticing, is that daily cycling amounts to a lot of exercise, and the health benefits continue to accrue. The problem with driving, and why it is "unsafe", is that it removes this exercise opportunity, and relatively few people have the time for an equivalent amount of exercise.
But are the old farts required to retake the test?
There's also the issue of the damage done to your body. Younger, I could move a mountain of wood (or some similar task), go to bed tired, and wake up not too sore, if not the next day, then the day after that. I can still do the work, but I feel it for days, maybe even a week or two.
You need to be a little careful here. A young woman can easily be better able to carry someone out of a building than a middle-aged man, and there are plenty of middle-aged firefighters. It's not just muscles, it's also joints, tendons, etc. You get to a certain point, you realize, "I could do that easily once-upon-a-time, but it's not such a good idea now".
I don't see a need for more bureaucracy, where we've been doing just fine without "signers" so far in recent years.
The whole nudie-cam thing, I am slightly more torqued off that they are using X-rays, and that the response I've seen to "why not millimeter-wave" is "but that's even more detailed!", as if we lacked the technology to defocus an image down to whatever resolution was deemed adequate with X-rays.
Using X-rays, especially at an energy that concentrates them in the skin, especially in bulk, especially with not-that-trained service personnel, adds a larger-than zero cancer risk. It's not a big risk, but it is actually there, and it's completely unnecessary, because we have an alternative. What we've got is huckster-driven security.
Something that reduces my chance of death, is safer. These guys measured death rates, and one thing they observed is that commuting by car raises your mortality rate, compared to commuting by bicycle.
(Much) Greater chance of death, therefore less safe. Dead is dead.
"this crap" is ineffective, expensive, intrusive security theater. Details have been listed much more extensively and eloquently by others, notably Bruce Schneier.
Someone's (your?) question more or less was, "why are people piling on the TSA, especially after all the other stuff (unconstitutional wiretapping, etc) that we've more or less rolled over for. Some of us (well, me), are pretty well tired of the whole war-on-terror nonsense, that has us starting wars on dubious pretenses, torturing people as an act of executive policy, performing warrantless wiretaps, "extraordinary rendition", and who knows what else I've forgotten to be mad about it. And next to all that, porn-o-vision and federal-feelups are pretty small beer, you are right. But you know what? This is getting people to finally make a fuss about the costs and the benefits, and I'll take my fuss any way I can get it.
And don't forget, they're justifying this as a solution to something that as already been solved. Hijacking into a building, unlikely to happen again, with a reinforced door and vigilant passengers (who stopped both the shoe bomber and the underpants bomber). What we're protecting against, is a plane crash. There's no point making it much harder to do that, than it would be to smuggle a Stinger surface-to-air missile in and use that from the ground. (Recall that we still have a bales-of-marijuana sized smuggling problem.) There are other choices, a friend with high-end military experience mentioned them to me, along the lines of "Damn, if I XXX YYY ZZZ I could take out 2 or 3 planes, just like that."
I'm not sure the article you reference makes your case for even one.
First, he slipped in while a flight attendant had the door open, instead of making the "open or else" threat.
Second, he said he had accomplices and explosives. The article you reference says (a) that he lied about the accomplices and (b) does not say that he actually had explosives. I could look further, but lacking further information, sounds like a bluff to me.
So much for research. Can you make a better case for greater than zero?
So the answer to my question is, "one"?
How about, we are just plain tired of this crap, and if this is the one that finally gets some coordinated noise going, fine.
Actually, no. You're not necessarily free to drive your car.
You are free to walk, and perhaps to ride a bicycle (I have read that there are certain mostly-empty western states where bikes cannot legally be banned from interstate roads, because the interstate is the only route. But IANAL).
What's so special about hijacked-airplane collateral damage? Cars kill 3000 pedestrians every year. Medical errors are up there, too.
But get plenty of exercise, and sunlight (or take Vitamin D supplements). But not too much sunlight.