On 09/16/09 15:17, Warp wrote:
>> Terrorist attacks?
>
>    I remember one year when terrorist attacks alone killed many thousands
> of people.

	I remember one year where over 150,000 kids were kidnapped in the US 
alone...

	And according to this:

http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/FY867

	More "children" (usually teens, though) have been abducted and then 
sexually assaulted than have died of terrorism in any year in the US.

	Perspective?

-- 
Kotter: "Have you ever considered becoming a vet?"
Epstein: "Uh...Uh no. My brother Sanchez was in the army. Didn't like it 
a bit."

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Warp schrieb:
>   I don't think that comparison is valid. There is precedent for dangerous
> influenza pandemics killing staggering amounts of people. For example the
> 1918 flu pandemic ("Spanish flu") killed over 50 million people. The Hong
> Kong flu killed about one million people in 1969. The Asian flu killed
> about 2 million people in 1958.

There are people claiming that /vaccinations/ were the actual cause of 
the Spanish Flu pandemy.

>   I remember one year when terrorist attacks alone killed many thousands
> of people.

Despite every one of these deaths being one too many, they are far 
outnumbered by - for instance - those falling victim to the tobacco 
industry even /every day/.

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Jeremy "UncleHoot" Praay schrieb:
> Just as another way of looking at this issue, the "car culture" is huge in 
> the US.  In most places in the world, bicycles are all over the place. 
> People driving cars must be more patient in those countries. 

Well, as a German I'd say "bicycles all over the place" applies to China 
and possibly the Netherlands, but not to "most places" in the world. 
Sure, bicyclists in the streets are quite a common sight over here in 
Europe, but it's not like our streets would be literally clogged. And in 
the netherlands, which might have the highest "density" of cyclists, 
they have a remarkably good system of separate ways for their "fietsen", 
so even there it's a no-issue.

But yes, the US seem to be particularly devoid of bicycle traffic, 
apparently considering them more of a children's toy than a "mobility 
device".

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scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> Yeh, my short experience of the US made me think that the entire road system 
> is not designed to cater for pedestrians or cyclists at all.  Making it by 
> foot even short distances is a nightmare, footpaths just randomly end, you 
> are forced to cross over large areas of parking lot or multiple-lanes where 
> it is obvious nobody usually crosses, or walk along the side of the road 
> because there is no path, it just felt really uncomfortable.

  In Finland these are quite common:
http://otoksia.fi/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/kevyen-liikenteen-katkoviiv.jpg

  (And no, the road going under the bridge is not for cars, but pedestrians
and cyclists.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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>  I read that in the US there's such a huge global panic about children
> being kidnapped, that at some places it even borders the illegal to let
> children *walk* on the street alone (eg. to go to school or hobbies).
> Eg. some woman got fined because she let her kid do that.
>
>  Instead, children are always driven by car to and from wherever they
> need to go.
>
>  Now, this seems to be an utter failure of perspective: Approximately
> 100 children are kidnapped each year in the United States. However,
> over 10000 children die in car accidents each year in the United States.
> That's a one hundred-fold difference. Nevertheless, they still consider
> driving them by car safer than letting them walk.
>
>  Thus the "cure" to the problem of 100 children being kidnapped each
> year is to have ten thousand of them die in car accidents.
>
>  Sense or proportion, anyone?

You're comparing the wrong numbers if you want to make a decision about the 
safest way for your kid to get from A to B.  You need to be comparing the 
expected deaths per distance travelled, not the total number of deaths. 
Obviously these numbers are not as easy (maybe even impossible) to find or 
estimate accurately.

Otherwise you end up with absurd conclusions, like the safest way to get to 
school is to walk on your hands with your legs tied together, because nobody 
has ever been kidnapped or killed while walking on their hands with their 
legs tied together.

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On 09/17/09 01:51, Warp wrote:
>>          As for the number, 100 is too few. In my small town of about 100,000,
>> we have a bunch of cases each year. According to:
>
>>
http://www.missingkids.com/missingkids/servlet/PageServlet?LanguageCountry=en_US&PageId=2810#1
>
>> it's more like 250,000. The number that are reported missing is over
>> 750,000.
>
>    I think that the article I read was referring to the 115 which get killed
> each year by their kidnappers.
>
>    I wonder how many of those abduction reports are caused by panicking
> parents, without the child having been really abducted. I wonder that if
> they call the next day to the police to say "we are sorry, it was false
> alarm", if it still is counted in the statistics of abduction reports.

 >
 >    My suspicion is that those numbers are greatly inflated by a (mostly
 > false) moral panic in the US.
 >

	I doubt it. As I said, the "great" concern is more a media myth than in 
reality. And as Darren pointed out, most of the kidnappings are within 
the family (say, after a divorce), which makes sense.

	In any case, the numbers I gave for 1999 indicate that over 15000 
abducted kids were sexually assaulted - I doubt those were made up.

	And yes, the number of confirmed dead is on the order of 100. But if 
you're a parent, death isn't the only concern. Being kidnapped for a few 
days is bad enough.

-- 
Clones are people two.

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Neeum Zawan <m.n### [at] ieeeorg> wrote:
>         And yes, the number of confirmed dead is on the order of 100. But if 
> you're a parent, death isn't the only concern. Being kidnapped for a few 
> days is bad enough.

  Even if we considered being kidnapped (in any way or form) to be about
equally probable as getting killed in a car accident (if we count also
getting injured in car accidents, which can also be quite traumatic, the
number probably goes way up, but as far as I understand it, just the
death statistics are high enough to easily keep in par with the kidnapping
statistics), some other considerations should also be taken into account:

  The risks may be about the same, but the consequences of avoiding the
risks are much worse in the case of kidnappings than in the case of car
accidents. The "solution" to the former is to drive the children everywhere.
This decreases significantly the amount of exercise they get, which is a
huge growing problem in the US. Even when they grow older, they will have
learned the bad habit to drive everywhere, and it's unlikely they will get
rid of that bad habit, thus worsening the problem of not getting exercise
throughout their adulthood.

  Also driving them everywhere is way more expensive, and this money wasted
on gas and car maintenance is always away from something more useful and
educative (such as healthy hobbies).

  Not to talk that growing in a constant state of fear is not healthy.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:54:51 +0200, clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:

>And in 
>the netherlands, which might have the highest "density" of cyclists, 
>they have a remarkably good system of separate ways for their "fietsen", 
>so even there it's a no-issue.

That's not what I found when I worked in Eindhoven. The cyclists scared me half
to death when I was walking about the town centre. :)
-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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On 09/17/09 08:47, Warp wrote:
> Neeum Zawan<m.n### [at] ieeeorg>  wrote:
>>          And yes, the number of confirmed dead is on the order of 100. But if
>> you're a parent, death isn't the only concern. Being kidnapped for a few
>> days is bad enough.
>
>    Even if we considered being kidnapped (in any way or form) to be about
> equally probable as getting killed in a car accident (if we count also
> getting injured in car accidents, which can also be quite traumatic, the
> number probably goes way up, but as far as I understand it, just the
> death statistics are high enough to easily keep in par with the kidnapping
> statistics), some other considerations should also be taken into account:

	Which gets to the main crux of the problem: Every society has 
acceptable and unacceptable deaths/related problems.

	Dying in a car accident, where no one was drunk and it was just an 
"honest mistake" is more desirable than dying via being kidnapped, or 
sexually assaulted while kidnapped.

	I'm willing to bet families who've lost children to simple "honest" 
accidents recover much quicker than those who've had their children 
killed/molested by kidnappers.

	So if you view things in terms of "risk", realize that in most parents' 
minds ("right" or "wrong"), they *are* going for something less risky, 
because one death is not as bad as the other one. It makes sense to 
allow the likelihood of that death to go up if it will reduce the 
likelihood of the really bad kind.

	You can see this in many aspects of society.

	Take iatrogenesis. It's essentially having adverse effects to your 
health because of "complications" while receiving treatments. It could 
include errors by doctors, medication errors, catching other diseases 
while staying in the hospital, and more. If you count it as a "cause of 
death", it's the third highest cause of death in the US.

	More people generally die in the US simply by catching diseases while 
at hospitals than from, say, diabetes. (Well, roughly the same number).

	Now I believe that if significant resources were allocated to address 
iatrogenesis. the number of deaths could be reduced by a lot - perhaps 
even down to half. And I doubt you'd even need *that* many resources to 
significantly tackle this problem.

	But society has deemed dying by being kidnapped, or by a terrorist, as 
much worse. Hence, it makes the tradeoff and allocates 
disproportionately more resources to those than to tackle this problem.

	Same applies to trying to tackle traffic fatalities, and many more. 
Health care, anyone? 		

	Of course, what I'm saying isn't an invariant. Other societies will 
view all this differently, but will probably have other inconsistencies 
related to deaths that may not be present in the US. And these change 
over time. I believe that society _can_ be convinced in changing these 
variables.

>    The risks may be about the same, but the consequences of avoiding the
> risks are much worse in the case of kidnappings than in the case of car
> accidents. The "solution" to the former is to drive the children everywhere.
> This decreases significantly the amount of exercise they get, which is a
> huge growing problem in the US. Even when they grow older, they will have
> learned the bad habit to drive everywhere, and it's unlikely they will get
> rid of that bad habit, thus worsening the problem of not getting exercise
> throughout their adulthood.
>
>    Also driving them everywhere is way more expensive, and this money wasted
> on gas and car maintenance is always away from something more useful and
> educative (such as healthy hobbies).
>
>    Not to talk that growing in a constant state of fear is not healthy.
>


	Which is all acceptable compared to being kidnapped. The goal isn't to 
reduce fatalities. It's to reduce "really bad" fatalities.



-- 
ASCII and ye shall receive.

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Stephen schrieb:

>> And in 
>> the netherlands, which might have the highest "density" of cyclists, 
>> they have a remarkably good system of separate ways for their "fietsen", 
>> so even there it's a no-issue.
> 
> That's not what I found when I worked in Eindhoven. The cyclists scared me half
> to death when I was walking about the town centre. :)

Mind you, I was referring to bicycles vs. automobile traffic - not 
bicycles vs. pedestrians :-)

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