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0 points300bps12y ago0 comments

This is the most ironic comment I have read in months.

You are effectively saying, "You must include X when considering A." You then completely ignore X when considering B.

9/11 caused the loss of 430,000 jobs

35,000 people die per year in car accidents. 9/11 happened 12 years ago. That means 420,000 DIED. That's worse than losing your job.

$40B in insurance payouts

Progressive alone pays out about $12B per year in auto accident claims. They're only the 4th largest insurer in the United States representing 8% of the market. If the ratio holds out there are approximately $150B per year in auto accident claims but admittedly I couldn't find a direct source for that. $40B in the last 12 years is a drop in the bucket.

I could go on and calculate the rest, but I hope you get the point which is your cherry picked (and made up) statistics don't hold a candle to other problems we have and relatively ignore.

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6 comments · 1 top-level

rdouble12y ago· 5 in thread

Sure, but I'm saying a single event caused this. You're talking about the sum total of all auto accidents over 12 years. Even 12 years of auto accidents don't add up to one major terrorism event. I'm not saying I agree with the way the USA handles terrorism, but it does seem like something you want to avoid. If there was another 9/11 or a Boston bombing happened every year, the country's economy would be massively screwed. My numbers are all from wikipedia's page about the economic aftermath of 9/11 and a Boston Herald article about the Boston bombing.

vidarh12y ago

The Banqiao Reservoir Dam failures in 1975 cost an estimated 171,000 lives and made 11 million people homeless. That was a single event too. By your line of reasoning that makes 9/11 pretty much irrelevant and we should all care about dam security instead, ignoring that it was an extreme outlier, and that aggregate deaths from other causes quickly outdistanced dam failures again.

Clearly there are psychological issues at play that makes us care greatly about large disasters, but that still does not make it rational to compare individual events to decide what resources to use to fight a type of event as a whole over long periods of time.

honzzz12y ago

You mentioning 'psychological issues' reminded me of the (super interesting) book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. In that book there is something about our ability to asses risk and emotionally perceive danger that is biased by dangers that typically occurred during many thousand years of human evolution - physical violence is evolutionary very old and that's why we react to it strongly. On the other side there are things that might be more dangerous (like obesity which kills way more people than terrorism) but evolutionary these are relatively new and we have yet to develop the 'sense of danger' to them. [I am just paraphrasing that book - any mistakes made here are mine and Daniel Kahneman is totally innocent in this.]

300bpsOP12y ago

You're talking about the sum total of all auto accidents over 12 years

I'm talking about the sum total of all auto accidents over 12 years an the sum of all terrorist attacks over 12 years.

Even 12 years of auto accidents don't add up to one major terrorism event.

How so? 420,000 people died in car accidents. 2,700 people died in the biggest terrorism event to ever hit the U.S. So that's deaths. Economic impact - no brainer, car accidents have bigger economic impact. By any measure, car accidents have a bigger impact in aggregate than terrorist attacks in aggregate.

If there was another 9/11 or a Boston bombing happened every year, the country's economy would be massively screwed.

I don't even know what to say to someone that writes this.

bluedino12y ago

Comparing the Boston Bombing to 9/11 doesn't really make sense. The OKC bombing, that's a much better comparison.

Attacks on the level of the Boston Bombing happen every day in various countries around the world. But something like 9/11 or OKC, that kind of stuff doesn't happen every day. One of those was by far the most incredible act of terrorism in the modern world. Heck, even car bombs that kill 100+ seem to happen every couple months.

rdouble12y ago

Well to be honest, I don't know what to say to you, either.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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