> There are a significant number of people on this site who are pretty vocally opposed to cars precisely due to the safety hazards.
No, they're not, otherwise they'd be on a farm and live of the land. Living in the city and being able to walk to the grocery store depends on other people with cars doing all the heavy lifting and delivering whatever they need by car to where they pick it up.
> I would posit that reasons why these risks are so underappreciated (and why we don't wear helmets in cars) is due to long-term concerted efforts to control how cars are understood and protrayed by those who make money from them.
I fundamentally disagree. Plenty of people die falling off of a ladder each year. Every time you use a ladder, there's a non-zero chance of dying. But ladders are great! They allow you to reach stuff you couldn't get to otherwise, so of course they're worth the risk. So do cars.
You can go over that for pretty much any topic. Want to live in a house? Construction workers are dying. Want to eat? People die in the process. But they're few, compared to the population of country, and houses and food are great.
If risk minimization is the goal, we'll all run around like the Michelin figure so we don't hurt ourselves. But we don't, because we want to get shit done, and for most things, there's a giant area where the risk is much smaller than the cost associated with avoiding it. The same is true for illnesses. Yes, it sucks, and of course nobody wants to die, but we can't go on like this forever because it could save lives.
You analogies and argument seems absurd to me. People can believe that cars kill too many people and also not believe that semis should not deliver goods to stores. The broad solutions involve priotizing pedestrians rather than cars and designing cities and transit to make cars both less necessary and safer for other road users. Instead we have regulations that encourage car manufacturers to make and sell bigger cars that kill more people for while achieving no extra utility.
Wearing a helmet while driving would increase safety for drivers at not loss of utility. The choice not to do so is indicative of the irrational ways in which we evaluate relative risks.
Balancing risk and utility is absolutely necessary, but we do a horrible job of doing that with cars.
> The same is true for illnesses. Yes, it sucks, and of course nobody wants to die, but we can't go on like this forever because it could save lives.
What are you even going on about here? You think that encouraging healthy people to get vaccinated to help protect other people is stupid because most people are willing to accept the risk of driving? You position makes absolutely no sense to me.
> What are you even going on about here? You think that encouraging healthy people to get vaccinated to help protect other people is stupid because most people are willing to accept the risk of driving? You position makes absolutely no sense to me.
This is likely because you're projecting positions onto the person you're responding to that they never stated, and probably don't hold. If you read their comments again, you will discover they said they themselves are vaccinated, and offered no opinion about encouraging other people to get vaccinated as well. That was plainly not the topic of their comment. They are simply pointing out, correctly in my view, that life is not and never will be totally risk free, and at some point the risks that covid presents to the world at large will have to just be accepted, because the costs of lockdowns as countermeasures are simply too great. We can't continue to prioritize minimizing covid at the expense of all else forever.
As a side note, the fact that you read someone expressing skepticism of some measures of covid containment, and instantly leapt to "they must think encouraging vaccines is stupid" does not reflect well on you, and is a pretty strong indicator that you're spending a lot of time in an ideological echo chamber that's eager to "other" and strawman anyone that disagrees with its positions. Something worth reflecting on, if you're willing.
> This is likely because you're projecting positions onto the person you're responding to that they never state
Ironically, that is precisely what I see you doing. You need to reread this full thread because your comment is entirely off base. The person I was discussing with was expressly arguing against encouraging people to be vacinated to help protect other people. This was justified by referencing how we accept (or in my case don't) the risks of cars in our society. There was no mention of my or anyone supporting indefinite lockdowns.
> We can't continue to prioritize minimizing covid at the expense of all else forever.
Of course not. I support encouraging vaccines and mandating masks precisely because we need to end lockdowns and still need to keep our hospitals running.
That doesn't mean I will sit by while people make ridiculous arguments to against very good reasons for getting vacinated.
No, you are wrong, and didn't read carefully. The comment of yours that I took issue with your response to the user "luckylion", who's only mention of the word "vaccine" was to mention that he himself is vaccinated. The rest of both of his comments that you attacked based on false premises are exclusively about risk tolerance, and the fact that we can't keep focusing on covid to the exclusion of all else forever. It's possible you aren't as ideologically bent as you're coming across and simply didn't notice you were talking to different people, but either way it's not acceptable behavior, hence why I called it out.
I won't respond to the rest of your comment or any follow ups as I don't believe it would be productive.
No, they're not, otherwise they'd be on a farm and live of the land. Living in the city and being able to walk to the grocery store depends on other people with cars doing all the heavy lifting and delivering whatever they need by car to where they pick it up.
> I would posit that reasons why these risks are so underappreciated (and why we don't wear helmets in cars) is due to long-term concerted efforts to control how cars are understood and protrayed by those who make money from them.
I fundamentally disagree. Plenty of people die falling off of a ladder each year. Every time you use a ladder, there's a non-zero chance of dying. But ladders are great! They allow you to reach stuff you couldn't get to otherwise, so of course they're worth the risk. So do cars.
You can go over that for pretty much any topic. Want to live in a house? Construction workers are dying. Want to eat? People die in the process. But they're few, compared to the population of country, and houses and food are great.
If risk minimization is the goal, we'll all run around like the Michelin figure so we don't hurt ourselves. But we don't, because we want to get shit done, and for most things, there's a giant area where the risk is much smaller than the cost associated with avoiding it. The same is true for illnesses. Yes, it sucks, and of course nobody wants to die, but we can't go on like this forever because it could save lives.