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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joseph Silent who wrote (76393)	7/15/2011 1:53:49 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218030

The cost of road deaths. Being somewhat curious and an engineer, that has interested me for a couple of decades. One of the notable things about government thinking and most people is that they bundle everyone in together as though people are fungible. Mere clones. Having spent 20 years keeping an eye on road deaths, there are a couple of myths I have noticed. One is that the deaths are of innocent victims. In fact, in NZ and I guess the same elsewhere, mostly people kill themselves rather than innocents. The next most common is they also kill birds of a feather in their car [a group of drunk hoodlums hooning together into a bridge abutment on a quiet country road]. Third most common is a combined blunder of one primary speeding incompetent meeting another incompetent going the other way. Many times I have avoided meeting the incompetent by judicious positioning of my vehicle, which is why I don't bother with having car insurance, and never have done other than temporarily when in jurisdictions such as California or Belgium where they have a legal requirement to have at least third party insurance. I have saved a fortune on insurance. There are innocent victims too, but it's a small proportion. About 20% or even only 10% depending on how you define "innocent". So, for the most part, drivers and pedestrians are self-selected for the Darwin Awards. The second myth is that the average value of humans is the same value as the people who are killed in road accidents. That's not true. For the most part, road deaths are of low value people. A disproportionate number of them are negative value people, who should be or have been in prisons, or otherwise are people inflicting costs on the rest of their communities, even if those costs are not actually "inflicted" other than by the way they vote. I mean people who live on welfare and are generally incompetent, dependent on free medical and other government services. Harsh though it might seem, we can put old people in that category too. They are not producing value, they are consuming it [for the most part - would the innumerate please not say, as though it's a proof, "Oh, but I know somebody who is really old but has just invented improvements on the theory of relativity"]. I have even wondered whether it would be desirable to put large concrete pillars around blind corners in the middle of the road, so that hoonsters who would not be able to stop if there was a 2 year old or 80 year old for some reason standing in the middle of the road, are eliminated from the gene pool before they harm somebody. There could be car recycling businesses and organ donor surgeries established beside the road to maximize value. Those accidents would have a net economic benefit to the community. If the estate of people whose organs are sold could actually sell the organs instead of handing them over by donation to surgeons and hospitals to make all the profits, there would be a LOT more organs provided to those who otherwise die unnecessarily or suffer needlessly due to organ or body part failure. Body parts should be sold to the highest bidders. With so much money on offer, the number of organs donated would zoom. But there would have to be bollards set up around all corners and perhaps safety barriers removed from around bridge abutments, because the number of accidents would drop quickly as people learned to drive more judiciously. You are right that we lack good data, but the above is near enough for government work. Mqurice