bediger4000
a day ago
This is great! I feel the same way about traffic regulation. I don't mean seatbelts, I mean stop signs and stop lights. Our yeoman drivers are best positioned to make the determination about stopping or proceeding themselves. Bureaucrats in Washington are too far away to make this important decision for every driver. It's best left to individuals to make the decision about personal safety themselves.
More seriously, you'll note that none of the charts have numbers. They're all more-or-less standard economics demand curves, except for Figure 3, which is a kind of "Laffer Curve" for "net lives saved". Table 1, which is a bunch of numbers, is for things that are (or have been in the past) collected by the FAA or NHTSA, some federal agency.
This is just ideologically driven application of junior-year economics, plus a mystical belief in "Laffer Curve" type cost/benefit analyses.
JumpinJack_Cash
18 hours ago
We all know (even though we haven't internalized) that airplanes are so much safer compared to other means of transportation, I'd guess that planes are safer than any other space a human can occupy including an hospital.
The goal of a human should be not to die, not avoiding death from aviation, the fixation to hammer on this industry happens because people are intuitively scared of it and the physics is not sufficient to have them stay calm because they ignore the concept of lift , propulsion etc. etc.
And also because of bad memories from the past which have nothing to do with planes, more like with the lack of a couple of Law Enforcement agents on board.
bediger4000
12 hours ago
It occur to me that the shape of that Laffer-like curve is important to all this, and without numbers (which aren't present in concocting that curve, only in Table 1, which doen't allow you to reconstruct the curve), you can't say that adding regulation, or decreasing regulation will cost or save lives. As drawn, the curve looks parabolic to my eye, but maybe once you work out the numbers, it's quite a flat parabola. Adding more regulation might not change thing much. Removing regulation might not, either. If it's not a parabola, or bell curve of some kind, what shape is it? which side of the curve are we on?
That is to say, upon reflection, this article is dumber than I thought. It's pure propaganda.