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Comment by adriand | Hacker News Reader

Airbags are cheap and car accidents are very common. I don’t think the analogy holds up.

"Cheap" isn't absolute, but is relative to your level of wealth. When airbags first hit the market, they were too expensive for most car buyers and, in fact, most cars didn't get them until decades later. Presumably, the people in the article are wealthier than you or I, and they aren't acting irrationally any moreso than the early adopters (relative to the the late adopters) of airbags.

Panic rooms will never get cheap - except in new construction - though.

Unlike cars, houses aren't replaced every 3-10 years. Retrofitting panic rooms will always be expensive - just like retrofitting airbags to a car without them (no one does it).

Similarly, the cost/benefit isn't there to everyone. Every passenger probably has a roughly equal chance of being in an accident, the likelihood that an average person needs a panic room is much lower than the top 0.001% (and probably bottom percentage in the hood would benefit to, but can't afford it, or even giving up the real estate to one, unless it was the primary bedroom).

Airbags were also expensive predominantly because they weren't being installed - and automakers DIDN'T want to install them: https://www.csmonitor.com/1988/0519/abelt.html. I'm not sure cost of production or installation was ever really the significant hurdle to their uptake.

Panic rooms are already cheap for the "rich people" mentioned in the article, which is the point I was making by characterizing "cheapness" as being relative, not absolute, so the analogy holds.

but they'll never be cheaper for not ultra-rich people, nor will they have the utility to warrant the expenditure.

They're probably not worth it for most people. They may have enough utility to make it worth it if they're combined with other purposes (eg tornado cellar made out of block and reinforced door). They don't have to be extremely sophisticated, and they could be relatively cheap if one does it themselves. Sort of like the backyard bunkers during the cold war - they were obtainable for a middle class family if they built it themselves.

Exactly. If I hit the powerball, I might as well buy a bunker, get one of those VIP health screenings, etc. The risks may be low, but the relative cost is inconsequential.

Also, car accidents are effectively instantaneous, then you're usually either dead or en route to a hospital within some exponentially distributed period of time.

Societal collapse can last anywhere from a week, in the event of a hurricane, to decades. Living self-sustained in relative comfort for a week is difficult, doing it for a month is much more difficult, and longer time periods approach impossibility very quickly.

re cheap: It's about hedging long tail risk. If you can easily afford it, it's probably a prudent buy.

I've given very long presentations to VPs about the same thing you summed up in one sentence. Well done. I may steal that for future presentations...

Airbags save around 2,000 people per year in the US. That means each person has a .0005% chance of needing it each year.

That's not "very common".

2000 seems really low. Do you happen to have a source for it?

https://www.nhtsa.gov/equipment/air-bags

It's actually less: 1,681/year over 30 years, although it seems like it went up toward the end of the range, so I wrote 2,000.

2.5 million burglaries occurr every year and FBI claim that about 68 thousand cases of injuries resulted from that.

Source: https://www.alarms.org/burglary-statistics/ (FBI says 1 million burglaries)

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

That accounts for deaths prevented but does not credit any injuries avoided or made less severe. Those are going to be some multiple of deaths.

Car accidents aren't that common. Most people will not experience one.

Most people will know someone who has experienced one.

I've experienced four or five, and most people in my inner circle have experienced at least one. Anecdotal only, but I'd contest the claim that "most people will not experience one" at least within places that have mandated airbags in new cars for the last X years.

Ironically, and somewhat supportive of the airbags analogy, none of the accidents I had were in cars that had airbags, or those that were, the airbags didn't / needn't deploy. There was one, however, where seatbelts were critical.

77% of drivers have been in at least one accident. Your chances of getting into a car accident during a 1,000-mile trip are 1 in 366.

The average driver will file an insurance claim for an auto collision once every 17.9 years. This means that if you obtain your driver’s license at age 16, you will likely have a crash by the time you are 34. This means the average person has 3-4 vehicle accidents over the course of their lifetime

Last time I looked the stats for a lifetime were

1% die in a car accident

10% serious injury in a car accident

Accidents 1 / 500,000 miles.

https://www.torquenews.com/14335/how-safe-are-tesla-vehicles...

I have been in a few accidents, none that serious so far.

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