I dunno, you're making a steam-heated upper deck sound like not such a bad thing -- melting the ice off by remote control would be pretty awesome, compared to whacking on it with an ax. No need for super-heat, just use it after it exits the turbines, or run a heat exchanger with some anti-freeze, so a failure in that system would leave the engine power intact (let's see, what still flows at -80F?). Getting badly iced is a common failure mode. I've seen pictures of boats after they were caught in North Atlantic storms, and I've taken a few whacks at ice dams on my roof (a sock full of calcium chloride works better). It's not like it's good for the ship or sailors to be out whacking on it with an ax in bad weather. An Arctic ship with a heated superstructure might represent a net reduction in risk of failure.
A reference describing this phenomenon, formerly unknown to me, would be awesome.
You also need some sort of current/temperature regulation, because the forward voltage varies (drops) with temperature. This is documented in most of the LED data sheets (including the one for the Luxeon LEDs). 0.1 V below burnout at 25C is almost certainly above burnout at 100C, which the LED junction will rapidly reach (and pass) without aggressive cooling or current regulation.
i was unaware that over-current to a power LED causes lasing. Can you provide some sort of a reference for this? (I don't need to know that over-current causes LED burnout, since I have once or twice made that mistake.)
I was unaware of any movement to silence people by name, and despite my tendency to disagree with Libertarians on matters economic, I think you're spot-on here. Depending on the phone/frequency, I think you might find that a "tinfoil" (aluminized mylar) pouch might do a good job of thwarting your tracking device, though I understand that this causes phones to drain their batteries extra fast.
Hmmm, so thinking about this, maybe what they ought to do is have (in a cost-independent world, ha-ha) is have some variation in the vaccines themselves, and really work hard to get coverage (because nowhere near everyone gets the flu vaccine). If you go all-in against H1N1wxyz, then a mutation away to H1N1vxkz gets an advantage.
I do recall also seeing the result of a simulation, suggesting that the right people to vaccinate against flu are kids. Not only do they have terrible hygiene and spend their days in dense mixed groups, they also have relatively ignorant immune systems.
It wasn't an insult, it was an accurate description. If you paid attention to the vaccine schedules, you would know that kids are NOT vaccinated against whooping cough from the get-go. A couple of weeks ago I filled out the medical forms for our second-oldest going to college, and whooping cough is not the only one like that -- AND I know roughly what the vaccine schedules are. Only Hep B (then) is given at birth. Everything else is later, at two months, or afterwards. And yeah, that first DTAP is nasty; your kid gets a fever and turns into a limp rag for a little while.
In addition, if you were capable of reading for comprehension, you would have noticed that I do in fact have at least two kids, because I wrote "and I have seen a case of shingles in my own child (one of the last kids to not get vaccinated because he got chickenpox from his brother as an infant -- a few more months, and he'd have had the vaccine)".
Ever met anyone paralyzed by polio? I have, at least twice. Ever known anyone whose mom had German measles during the pregnancy? I have. Ever seen a case of shingles? I have.
You anti-vaxxers are selfish and/or ignorant jerks. I don't see any reason to be diplomatic or charitable. These shots are hardly money-makers -- a kid gets about 2 dozen shots in his entire lifetime (remember, I just filled out the medical form for #2 -- he has 22 vaccinations listed, plus an entry noting that he actually had chickenpox. He has had one more vaccination since then, and another due early next year). Compared to the chronic-condition drugs that old farts like me get prescribed, this is chickenfeed. $100 per shot? That's a year or two of most "new" drugs.
Before you claim that other people don't know what they are talking about, you REALLY ought to do your homework. Giving birth didn't turned Jenny McCarthy into a genius, and the same goes for you. No matter how intensely you believe a nutty thing, that still doesn't make it true.
Read previous comments like yours and their informative replies. You are a fucking idiot. Babies are not born vaccinated, not all people can get vaccinated, not all people acquire immunity from vaccination, and some vaccines are not permanent (tetanus and smallpox are both said to lose effectiveness over time, apparently also whooping cough).
Whooping cough kills. Diphtheria kills. Polio paralyzes and kills. Mumps causes sterility in men and older boys. Smallpox kills (and the smallpox vaccine has/had more side effects than most). Tetanus kills. German measles causes birth defects. Measles damages and kills.
The only vaccine that I know of where there was much debate at all about its necessity was the chickenpox vaccine -- but even that causes shingles if it recurs, and I have seen a case of shingles in my own child (one of the last kids to not get vaccinated because he got chickenpox from his brother as an infant -- a few more months, and he'd have had the vaccine), and it hurt like hell.
But (US) flu deaths per year number in the tens of thousands, which makes the flu vaccine a more interesting proposition than otherwise, assuming it works. I've seen claims that it's not that effective, but I didn't have the time to vet the claims thoroughly (which is to say, some people have a bias on the subject of vaccines).
It surely is, but it appears that we are uniquely bad at a large number of these factors, whatever they may be, and lacking a definitive accounting on what the weights are, it would be good to move on all fronts. I have absolutely no problem with also taking steps to reduce income inequality and to nudge people towards better lifestyles. One advantage of putting things into a universal cost/care framework erases some of the silo boundaries and buck-passing that we get in the current system. As things stand, even under Obama-universal care, insurance companies only have an incentive to keep your care affordable until they can hand you off to medicare, and then not-their-problem. They also have no control over things that are seemingly unrelated to healthcare, yet turn out to matter (for example, the design of transit systems and (sub-)urban planning that help pry people's butts out of their automobiles -- a particularly unhealthy lifestyle choice). Under the current system, these sorts of things are "good" because "they are good for people's health". Under a proper single-payer/provider system, these sorts of things are "good" because they save money down the road on health care.
If we don't do well enough on "cancer survival" to raise our longevity up to the standards of the rest of the OECD, I'm not sure that is an adequate metric by itself. After all, I don't have cancer; perhaps it will be heart disease that gets me, or diabetes, or something else. Maybe the other countries do a better job of preventing cancer, or perhaps we do an exceptionally good job of detecting cancers early (e.g., prostate cancer, with overuse of the PSA test) that allow us to boost our survival score, when that cancer isn't necessarily what's going to kill us anyway.
That's why I like expected lifespan as a metric; there's dead, and there's not-dead. These other metrics are more ambiguous.
Yes, I think the poor are entitled to live a long life. Consider Matthew 25:31-46. Not a good argument for an atheist necessarily, but it works for a lot of people.
Perhaps in a country where the under-five mortality rate is four? E.g., Belgium, Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, or Portugal? Some countries manage three (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Japan). Even Cuba manages six. Eight's not exactly something to be proud of with our level of spending.
By what objective metric is our healthcare "some of the best". For life expectancy, we're well behind most of the OECD. Sure, we kick ass compared to Somalia and North Korea, but who doesn't?
If we're talking about health care, the longevity and infant mortalty are good metrics. They're not that bad as part of an overall metric for scoring a nature, either.
Socialism has been tried in many places, failed in some where it was tried to excess, but works fine in others where it has been used appropriately. The dose makes the poison. Socialized health care works well everywhere it has been tried. Most countries, including the US, have socialized transport systems (in our case, highways -- arguably, we have built too many and encourage their overuse, but they work, and are hardly bringing the country down). The trashing of various economies has not one damn thing to do with health care; we took a hit, too, with our more-private system, and some countries with UHC did quite well indeed. What did us in was excess risk-taking by under-regulated banks, combined with amnesia about what it took to get us out of the Great Depression (dropping the Gold Standard, and War-scale government spending).
Germany is an interesting example -- they've had a form of UHC pretty much like Obamacare, and they have managed to continue it through boom and bust, where "bust" includes the two World Wars that they lost.
They deliver lower infant mortality and longer expected lifespan. Those are nice, hard-to-fudge metrics. There is some possibility of fudging "infant mortality" by classifying some "infants" as "miscarriages", but I looked there, and the corresponding stats don't show evidence of such fudging. There are other metrics (for example, hip replacement wait time) where we apparently do better, but I think you have a hard argument if you want to claim that wait time for a hip replacement is a better proxy for medical care overall than life expectancy or infant mortality.
One possibility that is consistent with both our reputation for having wonderful hi-tech interventions, and with the expectation that universal health care leads to less buck-passing, less fragmented information about a person's care, and improved standard practices, is that we excel at (expensive) firefighting, but that other countries excel at (cheap) fire prevention. If this is true, it means that a shift to universal care will take some time to save money, because the benefits kick in more slowly. To relate this to (repeat example) hip replacements, it's better if the hip never needs to be replaced (presumably because of a better job at managing some of the causes, e.g., arthritis, or obesity).
Hip replacement is also not the great example it used to be, not since we had that mess with the metal-on-metal implants going bad (I have a sig-O-in-law who is having her hips RE-done. Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch.)
You seem to be confusing taxes to fund universal health care with social security, which is a large confusion. Health care insurance is pretty much pay as you go, and though there is a skew in costs to the elderly, young people are somewhat aware of reasons they might need it (pregnancy and delivery, usually routine, sometimes not; random medical horribleness, that sort of thing).
Social security is mostly a young-to-old transfer, but it is hardly a Ponzi scheme; there are projections for costs and projections for benefits, and it does not have Ponzi characteristics; people get their money out regularly (unlike a Ponzi scheme). If we accept the usually conservative projections of future SS budgets, then the money set aside in the SSTF will not be adequate starting sometime around 2035 -- but that is not an inherent Ponzi problem, that is something instituted in the 80s to help manage the retirement of the baby boom. Benefits won't stop; they'll just be smaller. We can fix that with relatively minor tweaks to funding or retirement age, and these fixes do not have the "then-another-fix, and another, and another" nature, at least not according to the usually conservative projections; you have to bring the system into demographic balance, and then you're done. The baby boom is one heck of a pig in the snake, and that's what causes a lot of the "problems" of SS.
A second important part of SS that you are ignoring is Survivor's Disability Insurance. When we went out to buy healthy insurance on our own (one of the joys of working for a startup), the initial estimates of the policy size were enormous. The sales-ish person we talked to helpfully pointing out that SDI takes care of a huge chunk of that. If it were not for the SDI part of SS, I would have been sending larger checks to the life insurance company for the last 15 years.
Almost all the other OECD states solve this problem, usually with taxes, so yes, I think the state will solve this problem. "Learn your history", my ass. Go look at stats on expected lifespan, infant mortality, and health care cost (either per capita or as percentage of GDP). I'm not asking for unicorns and fairies -- I'm asking for what other people in other countries already have. What's ignorant (implied by your "learn your history") is pretending that this is not the case.
I thought that there were states in which various flavors of tort reform were instituted, and the reform was NOT followed by interesting savings. I think Texas is one example. (I'm doing this all from memory; yeah, Wikipedia says insurance companies saved money, not sure any else did, or that it was big money. Shaving 2% off costs and dumping it entirely into the lap of the insurance companies would be a big win for them, that's for sure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tort_reform )
One way to determine the proper amount of worry is to look at how people behave when confronted with other risks, assuming that they have full knowledge of risks. Unfortunately, most people don't have full knowledge of other risks, and there are also other people (usually corporations with economic interests) hard at work ensuring that we lack that full knowledge (for example, tobacco industry propaganda, and is it coal, or nuclear, that emits more radiation? It's clear from reading above that various people believe both sides of that one.)
Just for example, consider the various risks from terrorism and falling out of bed -- beds are more dangerous. It's not as if we cannot control the bed risk, either -- beds can be lower, at-risk populations (very old, very young) can have side rails, floors near beds can be padded (carpeted).
A particularly unfortunate example of poor risk estimation (or alternately, an indicator of extreme risk tolerance) is our lack of exercise in the developed world (we get other benefits that offset this risk, but quite a few of us uncritically accept this risk). There's been plenty of studies indicating that the mortality rate for people who don't get much exercise is 25-50% higher, and expected lifespan is shortened by 2-5 years. You can see suggestions of this in life expectancy figures for New York City -- they're higher, presumably because people walk more. If you assume that this all reflects a rational expression of our actual risk tolerance, then you can justify lots of crazy risks.
How do you separate "bad management not taking the consequences of failure seriously" from any human endeavor? Isn't human hubris/stupidity/greed/impatience ubiquitous?
Think, also, of how managers are often selected over time. Do they choose people who learn from their mistakes, or do they choose people who are lucky enough to experience only success several times in a row?
Is that "people" specifically pedestrians, or people in cars? The unsignaled intersection near me has highest auto throughput without signals, signs, or police (these have been tried), so if you are just counting "people", yes, lack of signal gives higher throughput, at least until pedestrian patterns adapt. It's easy to drive pedestrians away, not so easy to get them to come back.
You have to understand, I have one of these intersections to look at. I traverse it all the time (or find ways to avoid it, on bike or on foot). It's not friendly to unarmored people at all. I don't get to look at the intersections in the paper, and I don't know the biases/backgrounds/funders of their authors.
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I dunno, you're making a steam-heated upper deck sound like not such a bad thing -- melting the ice off by remote control would be pretty awesome, compared to whacking on it with an ax. No need for super-heat, just use it after it exits the turbines, or run a heat exchanger with some anti-freeze, so a failure in that system would leave the engine power intact (let's see, what still flows at -80F?). Getting badly iced is a common failure mode. I've seen pictures of boats after they were caught in North Atlantic storms, and I've taken a few whacks at ice dams on my roof (a sock full of calcium chloride works better). It's not like it's good for the ship or sailors to be out whacking on it with an ax in bad weather. An Arctic ship with a heated superstructure might represent a net reduction in risk of failure.
A reference describing this phenomenon, formerly unknown to me, would be awesome.
You also need some sort of current/temperature regulation, because the forward voltage varies (drops) with temperature. This is documented in most of the LED data sheets (including the one for the Luxeon LEDs). 0.1 V below burnout at 25C is almost certainly above burnout at 100C, which the LED junction will rapidly reach (and pass) without aggressive cooling or current regulation.
i was unaware that over-current to a power LED causes lasing. Can you provide some sort of a reference for this? (I don't need to know that over-current causes LED burnout, since I have once or twice made that mistake.)
Quantum dual boot?
No, very very anything attracts attention.
Whooosh?
I was unaware of any movement to silence people by name, and despite my tendency to disagree with Libertarians on matters economic, I think you're spot-on here. Depending on the phone/frequency, I think you might find that a "tinfoil" (aluminized mylar) pouch might do a good job of thwarting your tracking device, though I understand that this causes phones to drain their batteries extra fast.
Hmmm, so thinking about this, maybe what they ought to do is have (in a cost-independent world, ha-ha) is have some variation in the vaccines themselves, and really work hard to get coverage (because nowhere near everyone gets the flu vaccine). If you go all-in against H1N1wxyz, then a mutation away to H1N1vxkz gets an advantage.
I do recall also seeing the result of a simulation, suggesting that the right people to vaccinate against flu are kids. Not only do they have terrible hygiene and spend their days in dense mixed groups, they also have relatively ignorant immune systems.
It wasn't an insult, it was an accurate description. If you paid attention to the vaccine schedules, you would know that kids are NOT vaccinated against whooping cough from the get-go. A couple of weeks ago I filled out the medical forms for our second-oldest going to college, and whooping cough is not the only one like that -- AND I know roughly what the vaccine schedules are. Only Hep B (then) is given at birth. Everything else is later, at two months, or afterwards. And yeah, that first DTAP is nasty; your kid gets a fever and turns into a limp rag for a little while.
In addition, if you were capable of reading for comprehension, you would have noticed that I do in fact have at least two kids, because I wrote "and I have seen a case of shingles in my own child (one of the last kids to not get vaccinated because he got chickenpox from his brother as an infant -- a few more months, and he'd have had the vaccine)".
Ever met anyone paralyzed by polio? I have, at least twice. Ever known anyone whose mom had German measles during the pregnancy? I have. Ever seen a case of shingles? I have.
You anti-vaxxers are selfish and/or ignorant jerks. I don't see any reason to be diplomatic or charitable. These shots are hardly money-makers -- a kid gets about 2 dozen shots in his entire lifetime (remember, I just filled out the medical form for #2 -- he has 22 vaccinations listed, plus an entry noting that he actually had chickenpox. He has had one more vaccination since then, and another due early next year). Compared to the chronic-condition drugs that old farts like me get prescribed, this is chickenfeed. $100 per shot? That's a year or two of most "new" drugs.
Before you claim that other people don't know what they are talking about, you REALLY ought to do your homework. Giving birth didn't turned Jenny McCarthy into a genius, and the same goes for you. No matter how intensely you believe a nutty thing, that still doesn't make it true.
Read previous comments like yours and their informative replies. You are a fucking idiot. Babies are not born vaccinated, not all people can get vaccinated, not all people acquire immunity from vaccination, and some vaccines are not permanent (tetanus and smallpox are both said to lose effectiveness over time, apparently also whooping cough).
Whooping cough kills. Diphtheria kills. Polio paralyzes and kills. Mumps causes sterility in men and older boys. Smallpox kills (and the smallpox vaccine has/had more side effects than most). Tetanus kills. German measles causes birth defects. Measles damages and kills.
The only vaccine that I know of where there was much debate at all about its necessity was the chickenpox vaccine -- but even that causes shingles if it recurs, and I have seen a case of shingles in my own child (one of the last kids to not get vaccinated because he got chickenpox from his brother as an infant -- a few more months, and he'd have had the vaccine), and it hurt like hell.
But (US) flu deaths per year number in the tens of thousands, which makes the flu vaccine a more interesting proposition than otherwise, assuming it works. I've seen claims that it's not that effective, but I didn't have the time to vet the claims thoroughly (which is to say, some people have a bias on the subject of vaccines).
It surely is, but it appears that we are uniquely bad at a large number of these factors, whatever they may be, and lacking a definitive accounting on what the weights are, it would be good to move on all fronts. I have absolutely no problem with also taking steps to reduce income inequality and to nudge people towards better lifestyles. One advantage of putting things into a universal cost/care framework erases some of the silo boundaries and buck-passing that we get in the current system. As things stand, even under Obama-universal care, insurance companies only have an incentive to keep your care affordable until they can hand you off to medicare, and then not-their-problem. They also have no control over things that are seemingly unrelated to healthcare, yet turn out to matter (for example, the design of transit systems and (sub-)urban planning that help pry people's butts out of their automobiles -- a particularly unhealthy lifestyle choice). Under the current system, these sorts of things are "good" because "they are good for people's health". Under a proper single-payer/provider system, these sorts of things are "good" because they save money down the road on health care.
If we don't do well enough on "cancer survival" to raise our longevity up to the standards of the rest of the OECD, I'm not sure that is an adequate metric by itself. After all, I don't have cancer; perhaps it will be heart disease that gets me, or diabetes, or something else. Maybe the other countries do a better job of preventing cancer, or perhaps we do an exceptionally good job of detecting cancers early (e.g., prostate cancer, with overuse of the PSA test) that allow us to boost our survival score, when that cancer isn't necessarily what's going to kill us anyway.
That's why I like expected lifespan as a metric; there's dead, and there's not-dead. These other metrics are more ambiguous.
Yes, I think the poor are entitled to live a long life.
Consider Matthew 25:31-46. Not a good argument for an atheist necessarily, but it works for a lot of people.
Perhaps in a country where the under-five mortality rate is four? E.g., Belgium, Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, or Portugal? Some countries manage three (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Japan). Even Cuba manages six. Eight's not exactly something to be proud of with our level of spending.
By what objective metric is our healthcare "some of the best". For life expectancy, we're well behind most of the OECD. Sure, we kick ass compared to Somalia and North Korea, but who doesn't?
Oh, you crafty bastard, you're not going to fool me. You're trying to trick people into saying Obamacare sounds good by describing it accurately.
If we're talking about health care, the longevity and infant mortalty are good metrics. They're not that bad as part of an overall metric for scoring a nature, either.
Socialism has been tried in many places, failed in some where it was tried to excess, but works fine in others where it has been used appropriately. The dose makes the poison. Socialized health care works well everywhere it has been tried. Most countries, including the US, have socialized transport systems (in our case, highways -- arguably, we have built too many and encourage their overuse, but they work, and are hardly bringing the country down). The trashing of various economies has not one damn thing to do with health care; we took a hit, too, with our more-private system, and some countries with UHC did quite well indeed. What did us in was excess risk-taking by under-regulated banks, combined with amnesia about what it took to get us out of the Great Depression (dropping the Gold Standard, and War-scale government spending).
Germany is an interesting example -- they've had a form of UHC pretty much like Obamacare, and they have managed to continue it through boom and bust, where "bust" includes the two World Wars that they lost.
They deliver lower infant mortality and longer expected lifespan. Those are nice, hard-to-fudge metrics. There is some possibility of fudging "infant mortality" by classifying some "infants" as "miscarriages", but I looked there, and the corresponding stats don't show evidence of such fudging. There are other metrics (for example, hip replacement wait time) where we apparently do better, but I think you have a hard argument if you want to claim that wait time for a hip replacement is a better proxy for medical care overall than life expectancy or infant mortality.
One possibility that is consistent with both our reputation for having wonderful hi-tech interventions, and with the expectation that universal health care leads to less buck-passing, less fragmented information about a person's care, and improved standard practices, is that we excel at (expensive) firefighting, but that other countries excel at (cheap) fire prevention. If this is true, it means that a shift to universal care will take some time to save money, because the benefits kick in more slowly. To relate this to (repeat example) hip replacements, it's better if the hip never needs to be replaced (presumably because of a better job at managing some of the causes, e.g., arthritis, or obesity).
Hip replacement is also not the great example it used to be, not since we had that mess with the metal-on-metal implants going bad (I have a sig-O-in-law who is having her hips RE-done. Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch.)
You seem to be confusing taxes to fund universal health care with social security, which is a large confusion. Health care insurance is pretty much pay as you go, and though there is a skew in costs to the elderly, young people are somewhat aware of reasons they might need it (pregnancy and delivery, usually routine, sometimes not; random medical horribleness, that sort of thing).
Social security is mostly a young-to-old transfer, but it is hardly a Ponzi scheme; there are projections for costs and projections for benefits, and it does not have Ponzi characteristics; people get their money out regularly (unlike a Ponzi scheme). If we accept the usually conservative projections of future SS budgets, then the money set aside in the SSTF will not be adequate starting sometime around 2035 -- but that is not an inherent Ponzi problem, that is something instituted in the 80s to help manage the retirement of the baby boom. Benefits won't stop; they'll just be smaller. We can fix that with relatively minor tweaks to funding or retirement age, and these fixes do not have the "then-another-fix, and another, and another" nature, at least not according to the usually conservative projections; you have to bring the system into demographic balance, and then you're done. The baby boom is one heck of a pig in the snake, and that's what causes a lot of the "problems" of SS.
A second important part of SS that you are ignoring is Survivor's Disability Insurance. When we went out to buy healthy insurance on our own (one of the joys of working for a startup), the initial estimates of the policy size were enormous. The sales-ish person we talked to helpfully pointing out that SDI takes care of a huge chunk of that. If it were not for the SDI part of SS, I would have been sending larger checks to the life insurance company for the last 15 years.
Almost all the other OECD states solve this problem, usually with taxes, so yes, I think the state will solve this problem. "Learn your history", my ass. Go look at stats on expected lifespan, infant mortality, and health care cost (either per capita or as percentage of GDP). I'm not asking for unicorns and fairies -- I'm asking for what other people in other countries already have. What's ignorant (implied by your "learn your history") is pretending that this is not the case.
I thought that there were states in which various flavors of tort reform were instituted, and the reform was NOT followed by interesting savings. I think Texas is one example. (I'm doing this all from memory; yeah, Wikipedia says insurance companies saved money, not sure any else did, or that it was big money. Shaving 2% off costs and dumping it entirely into the lap of the insurance companies would be a big win for them, that's for sure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tort_reform )
One way to determine the proper amount of worry is to look at how people behave when confronted with other risks, assuming that they have full knowledge of risks. Unfortunately, most people don't have full knowledge of other risks, and there are also other people (usually corporations with economic interests) hard at work ensuring that we lack that full knowledge (for example, tobacco industry propaganda, and is it coal, or nuclear, that emits more radiation? It's clear from reading above that various people believe both sides of that one.)
Just for example, consider the various risks from terrorism and falling out of bed -- beds are more dangerous. It's not as if we cannot control the bed risk, either -- beds can be lower, at-risk populations (very old, very young) can have side rails, floors near beds can be padded (carpeted).
A particularly unfortunate example of poor risk estimation (or alternately, an indicator of extreme risk tolerance) is our lack of exercise in the developed world (we get other benefits that offset this risk, but quite a few of us uncritically accept this risk). There's been plenty of studies indicating that the mortality rate for people who don't get much exercise is 25-50% higher, and expected lifespan is shortened by 2-5 years. You can see suggestions of this in life expectancy figures for New York City -- they're higher, presumably because people walk more. If you assume that this all reflects a rational expression of our actual risk tolerance, then you can justify lots of crazy risks.
How do you separate "bad management not taking the consequences of failure seriously" from any human endeavor? Isn't human hubris/stupidity/greed/impatience ubiquitous?
Think, also, of how managers are often selected over time. Do they choose people who learn from their mistakes, or do they choose people who are lucky enough to experience only success several times in a row?
Is that "people" specifically pedestrians, or people in cars? The unsignaled intersection near me has highest auto throughput without signals, signs, or police (these have been tried), so if you are just counting "people", yes, lack of signal gives higher throughput, at least until pedestrian patterns adapt. It's easy to drive pedestrians away, not so easy to get them to come back.
You have to understand, I have one of these intersections to look at. I traverse it all the time (or find ways to avoid it, on bike or on foot). It's not friendly to unarmored people at all. I don't get to look at the intersections in the paper, and I don't know the biases/backgrounds/funders of their authors.