https://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyamohn/2023/09/28/road-crash...
Its also happening worldwide, more air traffic near misses in the EU alongside road accidents as well. I suspect its world wide.
I don't see much correspondence with:
> In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, there were 503 air traffic control lapses that the F.A.A. preliminarily categorized as “significant,” 65 percent more than in the prior year, according to internal agency reports reviewed by The Times. During that period, air traffic increased about 4 percent.
Especially since the NYT blames the latter on "A nationwide staffing shortage — caused by years of employee turnover and tight budgets, among other factors — has forced many controllers to work six-day weeks and 10-hour days."
But the number or accidents per capita might not be. Pedestrian deaths have certainly been on the rise.
https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/publications/files/...
Cities should really start to regulate what kind of cars under what conditions they let mix in with people.
By comparison, London's ULEZ restricts diesels older than 2016.
Of course there's no reason why vehicles couldn't be restricted both on CO2 AND PM 2.5 emissions, if you want to promote small, clean cars
Yeah, kinda half joking, in the sense that these 3 hypothetical people don't actually crash into each other every day, but they all exist. I see them every day.
I've also seen a huge rise in cyclists on the footpath (sidewalk), and it's so normalized that I had a guy in his 50s zoom up behind me and the wife and actually tell us to get out of the way. To say that he got called all the things I could possibly call him is an understatement.
That's already an improvement over many other drugs, where the active ingredient is actively harmful.
It is wrong to claim it's an especially dangerous drug, particularly if your evidence is an anecdote about "many people who have destroyed their brains" in a nameless country based on no quantitative evidence and citing no personal experience.
Personally I would rather compare the actual incident rates of side effects from drugs than make a false choice between the most extreme symptoms, particularly when one of them is a common and relatively safe form of anesthesia.
A single dose shows traceable, but reverseable, neurotoxic effects in rats:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03064...
> Our findings demonstrate that short-term exposure of adult rats to N2O causes injury to PC/RSC neurons that is rapidly reversible, and prolonged N2O exposure causes neuronal cell death.
In the Netherlands the lower bound of people with paralysis, such as beeing unable to walk due to the effects of using Nitrous oxide is 64 in 2020. And that is by querying a subset of hospitals. These are indeed extreme usage cases. You also don't get a heart attack from snorting a few lines of coke.
https://nos.nl/artikel/2338520-64-mensen-met-gedeeltelijke-d...
This is much more then the yearly reported deaths for cocaine in the Netherlands. Which is reported to be 38 https://www.jellinek.nl/vraag-antwoord/hoe-vaak-gaat-er-iema....
If you compare the number of users in the netherlands you can see the picture how bad it actually is:
- Cocaine had 230k users in 2020
- Nitrous oxide had 290k users in 2020
https://www.trimbos.nl/actueel/nieuws/dit-zijn-de-opvallends....
This means you are much more likely to get paralysed by Nitrous oxide usage then you are to die from cocaine.
It's definitely not a good idea to label NO2 as a safe drug.
At the same time, in the US in 2021 there were 7.1 cocaine-related deaths per 100k[0], and 1.7% of the population had used cocaine in the past year[1], so their mortality rate is more like 417 deaths per 100k. That's hugely higher than the rate in the Netherlands and I wonder why there's such a difference.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db474.htm
[1] https://nida.nih.gov/publications/research-reports/cocaine/w...
Interesting. I wonder if average drug purity and common adulterants make up for this difference? What is the average "street" cocaine purity in the US vs the Netherlands? What do they cut it with? Inert substances? Amphetamines? Meth? Mephedrone? Who knows.
Also, what about the mode of taking it. Is there huge variability in how the users take it between the two countries due to different culture? (snorting vs smoking vs injecting, also multi-drug use). Finally, what if in one country this particular drug is more popular with the older population while in the other it's "all the rage" with the younger people? Death statistics will be different too.
https://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/2023/smd/young-people-with...
Electrification is great but it has risks too.
> In 2022, at least 578 road accidents killed at least one, in 2019 there were 522. The number of accidents with at least one injured person has also increased considerably: in 2019 there were 18,298, in 2022 no less than 21,455. According to the police, the e-bike appears to play a greater role, especially with people over fifty. The figures do not necessarily mean that cyclists on an e-bike caused the accident, but it is important to see where the increase comes from.
But the arrival of relatively cheap ebikes has changed the demographics of cycling in a very short time. Lots of people with little-to-no road experience or etiquette are now zipping around at up to 25kmh. These will definitely appear as a spike on the accident graph, but for pedelec I'd expect that to drop a little over time.
However I still think that pure throttle bikes and scooters that can exceed 25kmh are dangerous though. Particularly the scooter which has the image of a "toy" to a lot of people. I'm really not kidding when I say that I've seen 10 year olds on serious scooters, reaching 40kmh on walkways. That's always gonna be a problem.
SUV -> human/scooter collision is the only one that leads to fatalities.
Also remember, we have infrastructure for cars, but very little for pedestrians or cyclists. Cyclists don't want to be on the road. They're much rather be on grade-separated bike paths. I don't endorse cyclists on footpaths, but in a lot of cities it is legal if the road not have adequate bike infrastructure.
Similarly, if pedestrians are walking on a green, they should be able to be on their phones. I do not endorse that behavior, but it is not like they are responsible for coming under death machine driven by another driver.
Your comment appears to distribute the blame across all 3 people. But 1 of these is 2 orders of magnitude more to blame than the other 2.
_____
I do agree that any going at car speed (Motorized scooters, Lycra-clad racers) belong where cars are: the road. A helmet can only do so much if you face plant at 50 kmph. Anything that can go above 30 kmph on a flat, belongs on a road.
On the other hand this article says there was a 65% increase in significant incidents from the year prior to Sept. 30. So I think these are two different issues.
Operating a vehicle is a skill like any other, and if you’re not performing reps you’ll regress like any other activity. Empty roads might even permit crappier driving.
It's almost like people forgot the most important part of driving: minimizing distractions. If I'm in a high-stress part of a drive (unfamiliar roads, high density, etc), I always turn off all media and ask all passengers to be quiet for a bit because I need all my senses. I don't know how many times I've been saved by hearing a car that I can't see yet.
It’ll hit you soon too.
Luckily we have the control-group of Sweden, that spent a large part of the pandemic proclaiming that not closing schools was going to have a fantastic positive effect on children's learning.
The actual result: Sweden's PISA results declined much more steeply than countries who used distance-learning during the pandemic.
Those things don't necessarily have any relation, but clearly many countries with strict CoVID responses are still doing well in education.
In other words: remote schooling may have had a negative effect on ACT scores, but all evidence points to it not being the only (or even primary) effect.
Car crashes and ATC mistakes are two different sets of data. Just because they are going up or down at the same time and you can overlay some other event on top of it means absolutely nothing on its own.
There are a lot more reasons that car crash rates can be getting worse. For one thing, they have been trending upwards since smartphones have become prevalent. Car crashes weren't trending down for some time before covid-19. Also, the number of screens installed on automobile dashboards is increasing every year.
Still, I won't automatically assign blame to smartphones or automotive screens unless someone at least attempting to use the scientific method weighs in on the subject, because our intuitions about statistics are often really, really wrong.
The crash avoidance systen was a distracting alert that took my attention away from the road for none risks but instead increased there likelyhood to become a risk.
Glad to get my own car back with physical switches and dials without all this crap, having to operate a tablet behind the wheel is a dumb idea and no different to operating a smart phone behind the wheel.
A good time to dust off this classic:
This looks more like refusing to ever entertain the idea that letting COVID rip was a bad idea and lockdowns and vaccinations and masks were justified because you don't like it, than actual scientific rigor.
As always, vaccinated or not, the best thing you can do for yourself is avoid getting infected in the first place.
People’s tolerance levels and general concern for other humans plummeted in the post covid times. The warning signs about acceptable behaviour in supermarkets, medical practices and restaurants proliferated. I don’t know how you measure that effect though.
As I mentioned in another post, you can check this theory against the pandemic control-group that kept schools open:
https://www.thelocal.se/20231205/swedish-students-maths-and-...
* School closures during the Covid-19 pandemic were one factor behind the unprecedented decrease across the OECD.
* The general decline also began before the pandemic.
* Immigration was quite probably a factor.
Even without getting in to the details.
I remember taking the ACT many years ago and it was definitely much easier. Also not many colleges accepted it at the time. SAT was preferred.
And that's still true.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SAT-ACT-Preference-Map....
This should be reasonable proof that the test doesn't test things very well, IMHO, because there are so many factors that go into getting a good score.
I was one of these people -- I got one point below perfect on ACT, but the morning of my SAT, I got into an argument with my mom and got a below-average score.
These factors limit me from tending towards ‘reasonable proof’ on its face when considering the system as a whole.
Yep, I don't disagree! I happened to get scores that converted to each other exactly according, but overall I think it was good advice to try to use the system to our advantage rather than treat it as some sort of objective measurement.
I don't even know how to properly deconstruct how irresponsible this style of thinking is, it's just so flabbergasting.
In science you can't just draw lines on the wall between random shit like you're Charlie Day in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
ACT scores are very obviously not a product of your raw brain power as an isolated variable, they include a number of other factors like how much sleep you got last night, your family life, the quality of your curriculum and teachers, your socioeconomic status of yourself and your peers, and, of course, whether you spent a year in a global pandemic emergency while your school district scrambled to switch to a fully online curriculum with zero notice.
There is a very well-documented labor shortage for air traffic controllers. Fewer people are covering the same shifts - that is fact. If we are going to ignore the scientific method and start pointing fingers, this is so much more obviously the type of thing to start scapegoating.
> This might be the worst real example of a jump to conclusions based on a casual correlation I have seen in my entire life. I don't even know how to properly deconstruct how irresponsible this style of thinking is, it's just so flabbergasting.
Exactly who is jumping to conclusions in this exchange?
I used the words "potentially concerning" because that is what I thought and intended to express. I could have used words like "causally disastrous" instead, but they weren't what I thought or intended to express. I am also not smuggling in such a claim in a "just asking questions" sort of way. I think the potential exists, should be studied, and shouldn't be reflexively admitted or dismissed until studied. That's all.
Please respond to what people actually say, and ask questions if what they said wasn't clear to you.
The word “potentially” is the lone word that makes any attempt to pump the brakes.
Not necessarily related to the increasing number of air traffic controls incidents, though.
The latest PISA scores arrived just last week or so and do not support this.
There is a very weak negative correlation between number school closure days and drop in PISA scores, at least in Western European countries. The higher the number of school closure days, the less the results dropped. But the correlation is so weak that it's basically just noise.
Scores dropped pretty much everywhere so the pandemic probably had an effect, but the data does not support school closures (or at least its duration) of being the primary culprit.
I do not have a good English language source to point to (but the raw data is easy to find).
The Thiotimoline of vaccines.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Historical_Average_A...
Otherwise, as pointed out by lostlogin, mRNA vaccines have been used in humans since 2013 and studied in animals since 1989 which makes them less novel than widely claimed.
Since vaccine testing requires giving half your study population a placebo and then waiting for them to get sick. Bit cruel really.
What's the connection between car accidents and ATC incidents that would make one a sensible comparator for the other? They aren't caused by the same things, unless the extra car accidents are all occurring in intersections where someone is directing traffic.