
The Sorrow and the Shame of the Accidental Killer - ALee
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-sorrow-and-the-shame-of-the-accidental-killer
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arthurbrown
The amount of death we accept as a society just for the convenience of
automobile travel astounds me. It's been normalised at this point, but surely
at some time there was an outcry -- at least in the Netherlands they managed
to make a change before it became entrenched.

~~~
Aloha
Horses were dangerous, would often spook and throw riders - most carriage
designs are top-heavy and unstable, I won't even start on bicycles - pretty
much anything short of walking is dangerous on some level - even then you
still might injure yourself, even severely.

Modern Society lives in a fallacy - that we can somehow, someway engineer
danger out of life, that we can eliminate all risk of accidental injuries or
death and make everything perfectly safe and sanitary - and in some ways we
can, at an ever increasing incremental cost to do so - a cost that is often
not justifiable in my humble opinion.

For example, In 2014 the NHTSA required all new cars to be sold with a backup
camera - at an estimated cost of up to 143 dollars a car. In 2016 we sold
17,500,000 cars - if you add 100 dollars to the price of each car sold, you're
looking at an extra 1,750,000,000 or 1.75 billion dollars, annually - to save
210 lives - in short 8.3 million dollars per life saved - even if you look at
just injuries from accidental backing incidents, there were 15,000 of those in
2014 - you're still looking at 116,000 dollars spent per injury prevented -
and this presumes this technology prevents every death, and every injury from
accidental backing - Is this a worthy expenditure my gut tells me no (but I
might be a cold hearted bastard) - I can just think of better ways to spend
1.75 billion dollars in the public good - an education campaign, and requiring
a label, or warning sign to flash in the car would cost far less and probably
save about as many lives.

Society doesn't think about those things though, we choose the easy, feel-good
answer that all lives are valuable - its why for example, we've not even
touched on end of life, and when pouring money into someone who may only have
1-2 years left in their natural life - may not make much sense, and I'm not
even suggesting I know the answer, I'm just suggesting we start having the
conversation instead of taking the easy approach, and immediately passing
another law, then patting ourselves on the back for a job well done.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Does it make sense to include the lives saved annually for the life of the
vehicle? or at least the mean time between failures of the cameras?

Say the average reverse camera dies around 10 years after the vehicle is
built. So maybe $14.30 per vehicle per year / $175 million per year to save
2100 lives over ten years. Or 150,000 accidental backing incidents over ten
years (assuming ever one of those incidents can be prevent by a reversing
camera, which is probably optimistic).

What about when the original owner sells the car secondhand and recuperates
some of the original expense. What if we imagine new-car-buyers, when they
sell their car secondhand, apply the value of the sale only to the safety
features. Which isn't entirely unreasonable because when you sell a car the
only thing you have left is the injuries and death it _didn 't_ cause.

Where am I going with this: the parent wrote about _" amount of death we
accept as a society just for the convenience of automobile"_, which is a
popular trope but is false. We don't just accept it, we've done a lot to
reduce road related death and injury, and we are, evidently, prepared to spend
even more money and resources trying to reducing it.

~~~
Aloha
Oh yes, quite - and I'm not even questioning if reducing backing accidents
isn't a noble goal, it is - I'm just questioning is this the most cost
effective way of going about it is all. Improved tires, and mandatory
seatbelts (as in included with the car) since the 50's have probably saved
more lives than airbags however, as until recently airbags were only helpful
for a very specific kind of collision.

------
RickJWag
Strong parallels to the horrible guilt of an abortion.

I wish strength to anyone carrying burdens of this type. Truly life-long
wounds.

------
wavefunction
Not my experience at all from losing a loved one to an accident.

From what I can tell the murderer in my loved one's case doesn't feel a thing.

~~~
mcguire
"Accident" and "murderer" are contradictory.

~~~
manyxcxi
Well, they are and they aren't. I think I may have an example that the poster
was thinking about. At the very least, it's how I feel about it.

Senior year of college one of my best friends was killed by another guy
(within a few years of our age at the time). That person sucker punched him
out behind a bar, had used something hard as a fist pack (it was alleged a
roll of coins), and when my friend fell to the ground he hit his head on a
curb and never woke up due to the injuries sustained.

Did that person INTEND to kill my friend? I don't think he did. He certainly
aimed to harm him, but I don't think he wanted him dead. But yet here we are,
my friend has been murdered by someone else who meant to harm him, but
probably not to kill him.

An accidental murder.

To add, the person who committed the act had been in and out of lots of
trouble and never showed remorse over it either. He didn't seem like he was
happy it happened, just didn't seem like he really gave a shit either way.

