"The conservatives are effective. They do things. All we do is buy animal-friendly mascara. " -- Jude, _The Last Supper_

These Greenpeace types are the same people who've prevented us from developing and deploying newer, safer nuclear power plants to replace the less safe older ones which are forced to keep running--and which could replace polluting coal plants and help us immensely in the transition away from the fossil fuels they themselves also decry. They're the same folks who stirred up opposition to Yucca Mountain, yet use the lack of such a facility as a talking point against nuclear. They're the same folks who also fight hydro and anything else with "environmental impact" (i.e., changing anything at all about a local environment). Until they're willing to back some realistic alternatives to current power generation--other than living like Luddite hippies--I tune these idiots out. Solar and wind currently supply only about 1% of our national power generation needs, and there's no chance they'll ever supply it all. Until the Greenpeace types back something useful to our situation, they're the same ones keeping us stuck on fossil fuels. Fuck 'em.

>would you still consider a death "statistically insignificant" and not worthy
>of spending money on prevention if it were your spouse or child?

Statistics don't care whose spouse or child it is; that's why they're called statistics. ;)

Seriously though, the only reasonable way to make policy decisions is impartially. Otherwise, every time someone dies from something somewhere, that someone's family will want to outlaw that something, or to mandate that we all spend an insane amount of money to prevent whatever it was from happening again. As I mentioned above, I'm willing to bet that more than 200 people die every year from falling over railings--that doesn't mean we should mandate that all railings have nets underneath to catch those people. What a waste of resources--and these wastes of resources add up.

>It's not about blaming the driver (and if you think the driver is
>as much or more of a victim than the dead child or the child's
>parent, you have a really twisted view of reality).


I think a driver who has to live with the guilt of running over a child (assuming no mistakes by the driver) because that child's parent or guardian was irresponsible by not supervising the child is a much bigger victim than the irresponsible parent or guardian, because the driver did nothing to cause the accident--but the parent or guardian did. The innocent party not at fault is the victim, not the responsible party who is at fault, regardless of the relative loss.

>It's about giving the responsible driver better tools to more
>effectively do what he's doing already.


No, mandating a $200 per new car expense to eliminate a statistically insignificant number of deaths each year--that's about forcing everyone to pay a combined _$3 billion_ per year for the privilege of maybe not backing over a kid whose parents should make sure he's not there in the first place. Let's just assume that this would eliminate 100% of such accidents--which is unrealistic, but even so--and this would cost $15 million per life saved. Do you have any idea, any at all, how many lives you could save for $15 million? Way more than one if you're spending it right, so this idea must be spending it wrong, very very wrong. It's a stupid, overwrought, needless waste of resources. We need to think of the opportunity cost here, and it's huge.

>If you don't think the benefit is worth the expense, that's one thing,
>but you sound like someone complaining that mandating railings
>on stairways is an abdication of personal responsibility that forces
>responsible people to pay for those irresponsible people who don't
>have perfect balance when they climb stairs.


Making everyone pay $200 to have a video system in their car to avoid 200 otherwise very preventable deaths each year is a far cry from expecting stairs to have railings so that people don't fall--it's more like requiring all stairs to have nets outside the railings so that in case some fucking moron falls over the railing, he'll get caught in the net instead of falling to the floor. It's an irrational overreaction to a statistically insignificant non-problem that would cost a lot of innocent people a huge aggregate amount of money that would better be spent elsewhere.