“Hey, there’s no airbag. I can fly out through the windshield?” – Rocketman
Toyota® introduced their new Nagasaki airbag – they say “you won’t feel the impact”.
Annually, about 2800 lives are saved by airbags. Hurray!
Annually, 13.6 million new cars are sold. That probably doesn’t rate a hurray, I mean, not ever fact is exciting.
I’m guessing (numbers are sketchy) that it costs approximately $2000 per car to add airbags. This number may be a bit high, but replacing a single airbag can cost $2000, and many new cars have so many airbags that some cars can legally be sold as bubble wrap.
By federal law, all passenger autos sold must include airbags.
That pencils out to an annual cost of $27.2 billion dollars in additional consumer spending.
For airbags.
So, we have all of the math ready for us: how much does it cost to save a human life.
(drumroll)
About $10 million dollars per life saved.
Every Monday evening, Superman® researches bitcoin. That’s his crypto-night.
That’s insane. I mean, I know the goal is a good one, but why is the federal government mandating that Americans spend an average of $10 million dollars per person to save them? Heck, I don’t like most people even $50,000 worth. But $10 million?
This number, and, indeed the federal mandate that airbags be installed on everything on the highway is a product of the “safety at all costs” culture. Their motto is, “If only one human life is saved . . .” which is meant as a rallying cry for whatever uneconomic idea that they want to put forward. An actual economist, Thomas Sowell, made the argument that if you wanted people to drive safely you’d replace the airbag with a big Bowie knife. I tried to verify that quote, but the link that I came up with was . . . my site.
So, I couldn’t verify it, except by myself. I’m not sure I’m a reliable source, but, hey.
It would also decrease emergency room visits. Save him? No, then how would he learn anything?
Hit the brakes too hard?
Sorry about that – there are consequences to the driver.
Imagine how polite drivers would be then? If not, think of the lowered hospital visits!
The news is simple: no one makes it out of here alive. No one. We cannot escape the one inevitable consequence of living, which is death. The GloboLeftSafetyPatrol thinks that if we spend billions of dollars, we can make Death go away. No, at least in 2024, the only thing that we can do is shoo Death away from our doorstep for a little while by using better diet and exercise and maybe renting an 18-year-old to use as a blood donor to live off of them like a vampire. I heard them called “blood boys” once.
If I brought the concept that actions have consequences up with a GloboLeftist, it would break their mind. They live in a world where money is what other people provide to satisfy all the wants of the world. In my experience, most people want a lot more than the world can afford, so we have to make choices. Not everyone can afford a blood boy.
Asian fathers are disappointed if their son has a B+ blood type.
That’s the basis of economics, making the least-bad choice given the information you know at the time.
The second thing that drives the GloboLeftistSafetyPatrol nuts is the idea that people might have a choice. It drives them nuts. What if I wanted to buy a car that didn’t have airbags?
I’m the bad guy.
Why? Well, for that to be the case, the GloboLeftSafetyPatrol has decided that they own me.
To be clear, I do believe that there are obligations that an individual has with society, and that a society has for an individual. Pure libertarianism in the absence of an infinite expanding frontier is simply not workable, though it has been tried and certainly worked better than communism and with a much smaller body count.
A similar bad choice is involved with the decision to import the swarming masses of parasite carrying (link below) illegals to replace actual citizens. All of the job growth post-COVID has been by immigrants, either of the legal (or, since there are millions and millions of them) more likely illegal aliens.
When illegals do a home invasion is it a house swarming party?
In one way this is a multiple hit to the economy. First, these aliens, on average consume a lot more resources than are offset by the tax revenue they produce and work that they do.
For every illegal crossing the border, the economy has that much more sand poured in the gears in terms of unpaid for medical cost, schooling costs, infrastructure costs, and benefits cost. The average illegal costs far more than the average veteran, and much more than the average veterinarian. Heck, they even cost more than the average vegan, though they’re not so smug.
Second, for every illegal that consumes additional housing, often in conditions of squalor with much higher occupancy than an American family, the housing stock is consumed, raising prices. I read one story about a Canadian apartment where the inhabitants were living in every room in the house, including having a bed in the kitchen where two people lived.
Lastly, the illegals keep wages low. Literally if we import the third world, we become the third world because our wages will eventually drop to third world levels – the same goes for free trade.
Importing illegals (and, let’s face it, many legal) aliens actually makes the economy get worse, and it’s faster the more we import. With lowered demand for housing, prices would go down. With lowered amounts of workers, wages would tend to go up. Take these to the extreme, and California becomes Mumbai, but with fewer cobras.
If Chuck Norris didn’t have arms, what would his catchphrase be? “You’re about to meet de feet!”
The GloboLeft loves illegals, because of their compassion – but studies have consistently shown that their compassion is just that, a feeling, and that people on the TradRight are generally those that actually fund and charities that help people. To the GloboLeftists, that’s simply not their problem – government (meaning you and I) should take care of it.
We can’t afford airbags anymore because we’ve used that wealth on . . . airbags. And illegals. And any one of a thousand things that you or I could think of where the government either mandates waste or pursues policies that are directly detrimental to the voters. I mean, even Sweden is waking up to the concept that importing rapefugees might not be the best policy since there are no-go zones (Malmo) where actual Swedish people aren’t allowed.
But what bothers me the most is, if the government keeps wasting the wealth of the country in this fashion and at this rate, I’ll never be able to afford a blood boy.
I’m old enough to remember the Tylenol poisoning scare and now decades later every medication sold has some sort of seal. How much has that added to the cost of vitamins and aspirin over the last 40 or so years?
Yeah, that happened while first wife and I were on our honeymoon in Mexico. I recall upon boarding the return flight the stewardess asking us in rather insistent tones if we had any Tylenol, and if so, that we should not take any, as there’d been a poisoning scare while we were out of country…
The added cost has been about $0.001 per bottle, over time, because the machines that apply the seal were paid for 40 years ago. All you’re paying for now is a dab of adhesive and a circle of foil.
The original cost was 2.4¢/bottle, but that was 40 years ago, when Tylenol retailed for $2.50/bottle.
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/11/12/business/tylenol-will-reappear-in-triple-seal-package.html
If that’s a hardship, I can cover the cost for your next 10 bottles.
Let me know where to send the penny.
If you want to bitch about increased consumer costs, cogitate on the fact that a bottle of Tylenol now goes for between $5 and $10, depending on where you buy it, so Uncle Government’s inflation, of bwetween 100%-200%, which is almost completely responsible for that increase, has done 100x-2000x more damage to your wallet than the cost of keeping actual poison out of your medicine bottles.
Most of this rant is like getting a $12/lb sirloin steak at a barbecue, and then bitching about the price of the paper plates. It’s looking at things through a telescope, but through the wrong end.
I might also note that the increase in the price of medications in general also has to do with the overall increase in the cost of materials and manufacturing. Compliance to the Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs) is not free and the cost of that compliance in materials, equipment, manufacturing environment, trained personnel, and people to run all of this increases with inflation and cost of goods.
And how easy to adulterate other food? Mainly security theater.
Food? Probably shockingly easy even now. Medications are harder at least at the site, as they undergo a battery of tests. Probably not terribly easy in current distribution models. Possibly at the commercial end even now.
Honestly, counterfeits are a larger concern. One would be surprised how much drug counterfeiting goes on.
Very easy in any store, I’d think.
I know a few people here are following my story. This is the FINAL chapter. That’s it. The story is done.
Thanks for reading, by the way.
https://zaklog.wordpress.com/2023/05/04/march-16-2020/
If you’re new to the story, start here and follow the “Next chapter” links at the bottom of each page.
https://zaklog.wordpress.com/2023/08/09/april-9-2010-arrival/
Thank you to Mr. Wilder for letting me share this here.
Zaklog, THANK YOU SO MUCH for sharing your completion here! I’m honored you chose to share it here.
Well, GloboHomo would mandate no airbags but only for MAGAs. An example of useless regulation is the requirements for a Hazmat Commercial Driers License (“CDL”).
Back in 1976 I was armed with an MBA but no jobs, except for crappy $500/mo. ones. I’d have qualified for food stamps at that salary. So, drove a heating oil truck for my father in law at age 23. Loved it. $800/mo. Plus free gas & a company car (’73 Corolla).
Today? No way. You must be 25 & pass a long CDL test that’s not EZ. Do those improve the quality & safety of drivers? It depends on the individual, not those requirements.
But those do raise the salary of CDL drivers.
All brought to you by your Department of Redundancy Department.
Since most hazardous spills are liquid related, I can see the use of a Commercial Driers License. My own best dream is to have one of those licenses and ‘clean up’ gasoline & naphtha spills by using my own flame-thrower. Exciting times with it, especially for those pesky 2:00 AM spills.
A lot of that is related to the immigrant question raised by our host. With hordes of shitty drivers you need some way to keep them off the road, at least the worst ones. My co-workers and I were once entertained for 4 hours by a Nigerian trying to back up a semi in our congested warehouse parking lot. Hilarious, but I don’t like thinking about a countryman of his that’s even less competent being out there on the road because someone’s BiL saw a way to save money. Similar to how mandated car insurance is largely due to illegals… who still don’t get car insurance, because for some reason people who are here illegally don’t bother to follow the other laws either.
Some of our trucks carry batteries, which requires paperwork warning any cleanup crews of an accident that batteries are present. You’d think crews at a vehicular accident would just assume that vehicle batteries are present…
Credentialism is creeping. I would believe the current test has less to do with driving skills and more to do with being able to pass the CDL test.
When I read posts like this, I’m just glad I’m older than dirt. I don’t think my airbag is going to get me.
But I’ve been wrong (at least once every day) before.
Well, they are much safer than not having one.
Despite the old saying, you can indeed be too careful.
Or, as Mike Rowe so famously opined: “Safety Third”.
It’s an intelligent explanation of WHY ‘Safety First’ is a very bad idea, especially if you ever want an innovations or improvements in your future – and even more importantly: it’s really never someone else’s job to make sure you’re safe. That’s YOUR job ONE.
Just via searching for ‘Mike Rowe Safety Third’, I found this:
https://youtu.be/Km8XxRCuCho?si=j3PPrQuWUUO9IxrS
and comment like these:
“Just because you are in compliance, doesn’t mean you are out of danger. “, and
“Too many don’t see to get what Rowe is saying here. If you want to be safe, then you own up to it first, not some guy sitting in an office. Personal responsibility!”.
It seems there is at least *some* common sense existent in our populous.
Yes. We’re all gonna die – enjoy the ride.
A brief aside in honor of ‘Juneteenth’…
Last year, my employer, a Big Three defense contractor, put up a splashy commemoration of the new ‘holiday’ on everyone’s home page, so that when we logged in, we could feel all guilty ‘n sheeit about our ‘privilege’. But this year?
Nothing. Crickets. Not a mention of the date or of the ‘holiday’. It reminds me of how the covid mafia is now trying to rewrite history, claiming that they never forced anyone to do anything. (“You just imagined those arrows on the grocery store floor, and wore a mask because you wanted to.”)
In related news, our division’s DEI coordinator has been “reassigned” and her former position has quietly been eliminated.
The woke brigade is starting to be consumed by the monster that they’ve created.
Luxuries will go away when they can no longer be afforded. In all cases.
Globo-elites aside, it is women who ARE the Left in the western world. It’s not some unidentifiable amorphous mass. Leftism or Progressivism is women collectively, plus their usual allies: homos, the ‘minority’ races, commies, enviro-locos, and the assorted rest.
The smartest and bravest of women are beginning to realize that the Happy Gynocracy extant the past four decades is, indeed, failing bigly and eventually is going to drag their privileged behinds down into poverty, despair and tyranny, right along with those Children of a Lesser Goddess, mere males. Y’know, the ones they shoved under the bus first.
Yes the grrls will continue to be the Blessed Gender . . . but even that won’t be enough as their lifelong stupidity, selfishness, power-lust and arrogance manifest in real-world consequences in the nations they rule.
I suggest men’s advocates publicize and promote the women, rare though they are, who are beginning to question the foundational plank of the Politburo: feminism.
‘Are Women Hardwired to Care for Men’ at Welcome to Absurdistan
https://elizabethnickson.substack.com/p/are-women-hardwired-to-care-for-men?utm_campaign=reaction&utm_medium=email&utm_source=substack&utm_content=post
There are a lot of cucky men that embrace feminism, even as feminists shudder at the thought of embracing them and instead go for studly right-wing men.
https://nypost.com/2021/07/10/why-progressive-women-want-to-date-men-who-act-conservative/
The first job of the GloboLeft is to lie, and women and men being the “same” is one of the biggest.
It was economist Gordon Tullock.
https://boingboing.net/2017/01/16/make-driving-safer-by-replacin.html
Thank you, Ricky. Have a deeper source than Cory?
“…and maybe renting an 18-year-old to use as a blood donor to live off of them like a vampire.”
In case anyone thinks he is kidding:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6764071/
I really wasn’t. I mean, I won’t do it, but the Wealthy are.
You want to eliminate airbags?
Fine.
Require everyone who wants a driver’s license to post a $100K cash bond (half for damages, and half for medical coverage) up front, and make organ donation mandatory upon brain death.
Do that, and I’ll march in your parade, and subscribe to your newsletter for the No Airbags Campaign.
(If you can pass the Bowie Knife In The Steering Column addendum, I’ll double my cash contribution to that campaign.)
Until then, air bags aren’t just about the people that don’t die, because, dammit, not everyone who gets in an accident dies. So airbags also contribute by sparing society (you know, the people who actually pay medical bills, because sure as f**k, YOU – for any value of that word -aren’t paying those bills) the lifetime costs of taking care of the potted plants – you know them as vegetables – who formerly had to be fed, watered and turned towards the light after they ejected their heads through windshields and managed to not die.
Society also isn’t paying for the costs of all those faces smashed and splattered all over windshields, esp,. for the people who couldn’t be bothered to wear seatbelts either. So no plastic surgery paid by insurance (that means by everyone else, yet again).
Alternatively, allow the first arriving peace officer to determine fault, and execute that driver on the spot, and cut medical and insurance costs by up to half (depending on how many victims they created).
Simple, and fair.
The reality is that most people who get in freeway speed car accidents now don’t die, because of airbags, and they don’t even get seriously jacked up. They generally leave within hours, most of the time. And at least half of those non-victims weren’t at fault. Your wives, your kids, your relatives, your friends. Or even you.
Suck it up, buttercup.
Otherwise, the ante to get a driver’s license should be the bill for a month in the ICU, and major neuro and reconstructive surgery, plus the cost of the average new car. In cash, before you can test. For all those mothereffers who couldn’t be bothered to carry insurance, despite states making that mandatory too.
“Travel” is “muh liberty”. Driving a motor vehicle is a privilege, not a right. So walk, or get a horse, or learn to love the bus.
And it should take as many hours to drive as getting a private pilot’s license, with testing equally as hard, and as frequent.
Then we could talk about the cost to society when such common sense means 90% of folks will be taking the bus for life, because anywhere from 10-30% of the population can’t be bothered to drive without their head up their ass, wear their seatbelts, and stay sober before driving.
I also want one other thing, while you’re up: Getting rid of mandatory airbags?
No problem.
The first arrest for DUI/DWI gets mandatorily prosecuted as attempted murder, with a mandatory minimum 20-year sentence at hard labor for a first offense. On a chain gang, at the side of the highway, sunup to sunset. Hoping everyone else is driving sober.
Second offense is LWOP.
Any injury or death as a result in any case merits roadside execution, on the spot, for anyone impaired or intoxicated while operating a vehicle.
And if another driver executes them before the police arrive, it’s a no-bill, valid self-defense claim. And probably a civic service award, and a $20 gift card for replacement ammunition from the local constabulary.
Fish, or cut bait.
I tend to agree Aesop. Way too many folks we pick up in EMS were not at fault and the airbags and other safety features of their vehicles were why they lived.
Quality of life is the issue. Being a cripple isn’t much of a life. Cost of a human life, really? Guess it’s not YOUR LIFE or one you loved, eh?
I’d add your “Right” to not wear a helmet riding a motorcycle. Fine, sign here to become an instant organ donor if it was determined that a helmet would have helped with your brain injury. Why waste MY Tax Dollars taking care of your neuro issues for life and a few tests can give other folks a chance for a better life with your organs.
Fishing!
Okay, several points of order, in order:
I never said anything about eliminating airbags – I said don’t make them mandatory.
Folks are already required to have car insurance in every state. My insurance more than covers the amount, and I also have health insurance. I’m not sure that there should be an obligation for hospitals to cover people who can’t pay (as was the case back in the 1980s), but I’m just a caveman.
It is absolutely a fair point that I neglected the injury component, so I worked up some numbers. Are they right? I don’t know, but they’re a fair (IMHO) guess based on what I could find – I didn’t try to massage the number.
Here’s a deeper dive that covers (from a cost standpoint) some of your comments:
We had previously the cost of the airbags at $27.2 billion every year.
Deaths avoided by airbags? 2,756, again, every year. That gave me a cost per avoided death. Okay, now on to the injured. I didn’t track it down for the article, but I did for this response, because I wanted to have the receipts. So, I found data on the ratio of traffic fatalities to serious (Maximum Abbreviated Injury Score of three or greater) and found that ratio was 7 on average. This was out of Europe, smaller cars, probably likely worse outcomes because they don’t have as many safety features and also include Italian drivers.
That gives us (2,756 times 7) 19,262 “seriously” injured people, by criteria defined by people other than me. Serious is compound fracture or more, for the example I found.
If the average treatment cost is $200,000 – some will be more, some will be much less, but this will be skewed towards “less” injured because that’s the way that the statistics of injuries work, well, then the $200,000 seems reasonable. That total? $3.9 billion.
It seems reasonable, but, hell, let’s double it.
About half of the cars (my guess) will end up deploying an airbag of the 5 million crashes per year. But, let’s cut that in half. Call in 1.25 million crashes, where the car can be fixed but the airbag deployed. This happened to me, three times out of three on airbag deployments. And, no, I never even touched the airbag, and neither did the deer on the county road or the pickup truck that ignored the stop sign on the federal highway.
But that’s not the point – The airbags were replaced, at $2000 per accident. Let’s assume that happens on those 1.25 million times. High? Low? It’s about $3billion.
So, my original $27.2 billion minus the costs for the additional injured, doubled ($7.8 billion) plus the cost for replacing airbags ($3 billion) leads to . . . $22.4 billion.
Again, I’ve tried to make this conservative and in your favor.
That leads to a cost per life saved of $8.1 million.
So, my number is wrong, or it’s right. Would I pay extra for airbags? Yeah, I think so. Do I think everyone should have to? No.
But the Bowie knife? That should be mandatory.