This article is a great example of motivated reasoning. It's comparing two wildly different numbers: the Ford Pinto number is the total number of deaths that the NHTSA found to have occurred in rear-impact crashes that resulted in a fire. The Cybertruck number is the total number of deaths from all incidents involving fire and a Cybertruck.
According to the Wikipedia article about the Pinto:
> At the time only 1% of automobile crashes would result in fire and only 4% of fatal accidents involved fire, and only 15% of fatal fire crashes are the result of rear-end collisions.
So as a back of the envelope calculation, we'd expect the total number of Pinto fire fatalities to be about 6.5x the fire fatality rate specific to rear-end collisions. Even then, I doubt that statistic would include incidents like the Las Vegas case where the man shot himself in the head while detonating an improvised explosive in his Cybertruck.
This doesn't even get into sample size - the Tesla numbers are based on only 3 incidents and 5 fatalities:
- one, a single-car accident in which 3 people died,
- two, a single-car accident in which 1 person died, and
- three, the driver shot himself in the head
If, say, the first driver hadn't had any passengers and the third driver had not been included in the sample (because it's not a collision), the Cybertruck's rate would be 60% lower. With such a small sample, it's very silly to make confident assertions about the relative risks here.
Finally, both articles are only talking about fire risks, not overall safety record. I would definitely bet that the Cybertruck has a significantly lower fatality rate per mile than a 1975 Pinto purely based on changes in vehicle safety testing and engineering since the 1970s.
> It’s funny because the Ford Pinto is thought of as an example of an unreliable death trap but the deaths from Tesla’s poor craftsmanship and design heavily outweigh the Pinto by a wide margin.
What are the stats you're referencing here? I find this difficult to believe, as modern cars are generally much safer than cars from the 1970s and Teslas seem to perform well in crash tests. They'd need to be incredibly dangerous relative to other modern cars to be as dangerous as a typical car from the 1970s.
> An analysis published Thursday by the auto news website FuelArc found that, in their one year of existence, the approximately 34,000 Cybertrucks on the roads had five fire fatalities, giving them a fatality rate of 14.5 per 100,000 units. That’s 17 times the fatality rate of the Ford Pintos, whose famously flawed gas tank design on the car’s rear end led to 27 reported fire fatalities in its nine years on the road, resulting in a fatality rate of 0.85 per 100,000 units, according to FuelArc.
The Ford Pinto number is the total number of deaths that the NHTSA found to have occurred between 1970 and mid-1977 (so not the full 9-year period) in rear-impact crashes that resulted in a fire.
This is not comparable to the total number of fatalities involving fire and a Cybertruck (regardless of the impact type, or lack thereof, e.g. the Las Vegas fatality was due to the guy shooting himself in the head). Not a single one of the three Cybertruck incidents would have been included in the Ford Pinto statistic because none of them were rear-impact crashes that resulted in a fire.
According to the Wikipedia article about the Pinto:
> At the time only 1% of automobile crashes would result in fire and only 4% of fatal accidents involved fire, and only 15% of fatal fire crashes are the result of rear-end collisions.
So we'd expect the total fire fatality rate to be about 6.5x the fatality rate specific to rear-end collisions that resulted in fire.
And of course, saying "Teslas are more dangerous than Ford Pintos" is very different than saying "the Tesla Cybertruck has a higher rate of fire fatalities than the Ford Pinto." Even the latter statement would be incorrect but the former is simply absurd.
A single Cybertruck weighs as much as three Ford Pintos. We should be sure to include Newton's second law in our evaluations of which is the more dangerous vehicle.
The good faith version of this would be that he is telling the truth, he didn't share or offer to share the photos with anyone, and the rumors the plaintiff heard about people seeing the photos were just rumors. (I think it's clear that at the very least, he mentioned the nude photos to at least one other person - otherwise no rumor could get started in the first place - which is obviously bad behavior, but not nearly as bad as actually sharing the photos.)
Because the sharing of the photos with other people wasn't established by the evidence, the court was just ruling on whether the DA had violated the plaintiffs rights by transferring the data dump from the plaintiff's phone to the sheriff, and whether that violation was obvious/established enough from prior court rulings to revoke QI. It had nothing to do with sharing the photos themselves with anyone (the DA didn't know the data dump had the photos when he shared it).
I've come across compromising data over the years--and never have I referred to it in any way that would permit identification of the person. Either it warrants going to the police or it stays private, there's no in between.
Do you honestly think, as a principled position, that police officers should be personally liable for enforcing a law which is later decided to be unconstitutional?
For example, if a police officer in 1994 arrested someone for violating the Gun Free School Zones act (struck down as unconstitutional in 1995), should they be personally liable for the damages? Should the judge who decided the case?
Similarly, if a police officer in NYC arrested someone in 2018 for violating the ban on "gravity knives" (struck down as unconstitutional in 2019), should they be personally liable?
If a police officer in Washington, DC arrested someone for violating the city's ban on handguns in 2007 (struck down by the Supreme Court in 2008), should they be personally liable?
Would it be a good thing if police officers and officials refuse to enforce Washington state's ban on "assault weapons", or Oregon's magazine capacity limit, because the "conservative turn" of the Supreme Court means that the law might get struck down as unconstitutional, and then they'd be personally liable for the damages?
I think it's clear that QI sometimes leads to bad outcomes, but honestly, I'm not sure how the system would function without some similar concept.
I think that letting it go to a jury is reasonable. QI short-circuits the entire jury process, ending the case almost immediately. Letting a lawsuit develop and letting a jury decide if the Officers actions were reasonable or not, given the totality of the circumstances, seems the correct solution to the problem, which as you note is somewhat tricky. After all, the officers who arrested the original 15 Episcopal Priests were found not liable by a jury of their peers. If it worked for them, why do you think it wouldn't work now?
Yes, police officers will have to deal with more lawsuits, but that's not an outcome that bothers me particularly. Society grants them a great deal of rights to violence that the rest of us do not have, they should likewise face greater scrutiny for their choices, or they are not worthy of holding that responsibility.
Note that Colorado removed QI by law, and made officers personally liable (up to certain limits) and seems to not be any sort of anarchy.
Letting it get to a jury opens them up to a flood of baseless lawsuits. People seeking to get go-away money. There needs to be a high fence and it needs to be determined by forces other than the person bringing the lawsuit.
You can easily come up with opposite scenarios: if the law says you go to jail for being a certain race and sitting in a certain place, or for being certain sex and wearing certain clothes, should police officers suffer no consequences for enforcing such things? We've long established that "just following orders" is not a sufficient excuse.
There are cases where it's reasonable for a police officer to enforce a law that turns out to be unconstitutional and there are cases where it's not. Distinguishing between those cases is what the courts are for. Giving officers blanket immunity is not the way to handle it.
Every time I'm out and about, I have to wonder if I'm making some mistake that's going to get me in trouble with the law. Why should police be exempt from this?
often legal by their countries law hence the excuse "i was just following orders/my laws" being similar to cops "following the law" even in the clear face of it being wrong
The same way it does everything, by letting it go to a court and have them figure it out, like every one crime or civil action - why would the cops be different if they are doing illegal things?
This is not a sliding slope, its just acknowledging police are also just people.
It's worth noting that 3 of the 4 examples above deal with guns. The 4th deals with knives. ... Thank God we spend so much time and energy arguing about weapons, guided by a document that was written over 200 years ago. It would be a nightmare if, as a society, we spent that energy on something like curing disease or providing for the needy. Sheesh. /s
> It's functionally isomorphic to a black box where I make a deposit, every time it denies someone medical treatment I get back monetary reward and I can withdraw my deposit at any time. If we ask ourselves, "Should this black box exist?" I cannot reasonably expect people to say, "Yes." Yet, here we are.
I am honestly extremely baffled about what your mental model here is. When UHC doesn't deny a claim, who is paying for that treatment? You can't just look at one side of the ledger when deciding whether the system is doing good or bad! They deny some claims and they pay for others! You're leaving out the whole second half!
I omitted it because it doesn't change the calculus.
If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed.
According to who? It changes the calculus for me. I pay my health insurance because it covers the services I need. I could absolutely opt out if I wanted to, but I don't.
> I pay my health insurance because it covers the services I need
I think that, aside from the cost, this is probably the biggest issue most people have with health insurance in the US. UHC makes a lot of money specifically in part by not covering services you need, for example by having accountants override your doctors's orders.
If it were as simple as getting the services you need in exchange for money, I don't think as many people would hate the system as much.
How many Go Fund Me sites were brought up because of high medical costs for some accident or cancer? Is foregoing insurance an improvement over that if it isn't even possibly one of the big causes?
And that the US is the only country in the world where hospital "deathbed divorce" is a thing, to try to avoid family being saddled with ship-anchor levels of debt.
No, it isn't, which is why people want some form of insurance, whether public or private. To mitigate risk.
I was entertaining the comment about something being as "simple as getting the services you need in exchange for money". Which one certainly could do, but imposing that on everyone would also be a bad system for other reasons.
You missed the point of my comment. The "services" I was referring to was "health insurance," and the "for money" is the monthly premiums.
In too many instances, people pay the premiums and then do not get the benefits of the insurance.
An analogy in the travel industry might be if we had a system where at random, a double-digit percentage of air travelers were denied boarding and not refunded their money. No amount of legalese would make it acceptable, and in fact Congress regulates air travel such that practices like this hypothetical are not allowed.
Yes, people should get coverage under the terms of their agreement. I'd guess that the reason this is an issue with health coverage is because the sums involved are great, and usually the people on either side of the argument are either (1) unwilling or unable to effectively argue their case or (2) nonexperts who lack full understanding of the subject matter.
These aren't really an issue with airline tickets, not because we don't regulate insurance, but because the contract is exponentially more simple and understandable.
Air travelers are not expected to have a full understanding of how to operate a jet airplane, or an airline, in order to not be cheated out of their fares. Similarly, they are not expected to plead their case in order to not be cheated by airlines.
I use the colloquial "cheat" intentionally, as it is a valid descriptor.
Notably, however: most insurance delays/denials will have in common that the patient is represented by an expert (a physician) on their case, while the insurer will be represented by a person who has typically never spoken with or examined the patient and may not have ever practiced medicine. The quality of the argument and expertise of the interlocutor are red herrings.
> Air travelers are not expected to have a full understanding of how to operate a jet airplane, or an airline, in order to not be cheated out of their fares.
Correct. But it doesn't matter because the contract of carriage doesn't hinge on that. There's no confusion about what a ticket actually entails. If a ticket covers "one ride at the airport, from Cleveland to Omaha", it's pretty understandable what you are getting. If health insurance was just as simple, and covered "one ride at a hospital, from sickness to health", it would be likewise as accessible. But it isn't that way (although maybe it should be a lot closer)
> Notably, however: most insurance delays/denials will have in common that the patient is represented by an expert (a physician) on their case, while the insurer will be represented by a person who has typically never spoken with or examined the patient and may not have ever practiced medicine. The quality of the argument and expertise of the interlocutor are red herrings.
I understand but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about a broader information and accessibility disparity.
Having a physician isn't any help if your insurer is deadlocking you on coverage you legally have coverage for, you need a lawyer. That's a contract law problem, not a healthcare problem.
But if you don't actually have coverage for what you need, having a physician argue that you need it, isn't going to help you. Most people buy their health insurance policy all by themselves, without any legal or medical help.
The system wasn't designed. There were no design choices. The entire thing is a legacy result of expectations and costs that all started snowballing from the moment FDR decided wage caps were a good way to stop inflation.
We're not in the situation we're in because anyone thought it was a good idea. We got here incrementally over ~80 years.
of course the system was designed. of course there were design choices. it's a system implemented and executed by human beings at every step, constantly. every functional atom of this implementation was a conscious choice by someone. if nothing else, a choice is constantly being made to persist with the present system.
yes the design is a result of negotiation between countless people and groups of people, who all have varying power and responsibility and subjective consequence. yes all of these choices were made in context, but they were never the only choices that could have been made in that context.
this negotiation, and these innumerable choices, these designs have been a major if not primary concern of the past twenty years of american politics, economy, and millions of individual lives.
yes we have arrived at the implementation we see today, which seems ill-conceived, over-complicated, and pointlessly cruel. but at every moment that has passed and is passing now, different choices can be made, and a different system of different design can be implemented.
we are still in this system because there is infrastructure that prevents change to a more agreeable system. negotiation tactics may have just changed.
Sure, the healthcare system is "designed and perpetuated" by all of its participants, in the same way that poor labor practices in Asia are perpetuated by Walmart cashiers.
Technically all of the participants involved are a part of the system, yes, but my key point here is that none of them have the agency to change it.
The only people who can change it are voters and congress themselves.
> The only people who can change it are voters and congress themselves.
Most of the participants in the system are eligible voters, so asserting that voters can change the system is very much asserting that nearly everyone in the system has agency to change it.
(The fact is “voters can change it” is optimistic, because the US is not a direct democracy and, due to gerrymandering, campaign finance, and other factors, only loosely a representative one, being functionally more of a plutocracy. The people who benefit from its inefficiencies and inequities have disproportionate power over its structure.)
Look, in any system, there are going to have to be arguments where patients or doctors say some treatment is necessary, and the entity paying for the treatment says it's not.
You will of course stick to your principles here? The single-payer healthcare systems in Canada and the UK are irredeemable and it's morally repugnant to look at any good they've done for anyone?
>in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed.
...and nothing of positive value would be lost. For a paradise predisposed on the infliction of suffering on another is ill-gotten, and taints anyone that avails themselves of it once it's true nature is known.
Our birthright is to toil to elevate one another; no more, no less. Omelas is a blight, a perversion, deserving of being scoured from the face of the Earth no matter where it pops up.
Glad to see someone else was touched by that work. Greetings fellow wanderer.
> imagine no market volatility - everything is constant (e.g you've bought bounds)
is where everything breaks down.
Yes, if you keep all your money under your mattress, which is what's actually modeled here (bonds bear interest!) then as long as you don't run out, the unspent amount doesn't matter.
But that would be absolutely bonkers and no one would do it. Instead, you invest in interest-bearing assets. The current inflation-adjusted risk-free rate of return is 1.76%. So if you have a net worth of $2M, you could invest it in bonds and spend $35k a year forever and still pass on the entire principle when you die, essentially guaranteed. If you have a net worth of $500k, on the other hand, you could invest it in bonds and spend $8,800 a year forever.
Of course this would still be crazy - you can get higher yield by taking some risk (and notably, having a higher net worth will allow you to take more risks and get more reward without the risk of running out of money) - but even in the "just buy bonds" scenario, you're much better off with $2M than $500k.
If the lottery administrator's daughter wins the lottery, he may say "no, no - don't you see, her probability of getting the winning numbers is exactly the same as anyone else's!"
But in reality, we can say that:
- her probability of winning in the world where her father is cheating is very high
- her probability of winning in the world where her father isn't cheating is very low
Together these two facts give us evidence about which world we're actually inhabiting - though of course we can never be completely certain!
In the same way, yes, it's equally (im)probable that the winning percent will be 51.211643879% or 51.200000000%. But the latter is more likely to occur in a world where Maduro said "get me 51.2% of the votes" and someone just did that mechanically with a pocket calculator, which is good evidence about which world we live in.
According to the Wikipedia article about the Pinto:
> At the time only 1% of automobile crashes would result in fire and only 4% of fatal accidents involved fire, and only 15% of fatal fire crashes are the result of rear-end collisions.
So as a back of the envelope calculation, we'd expect the total number of Pinto fire fatalities to be about 6.5x the fire fatality rate specific to rear-end collisions. Even then, I doubt that statistic would include incidents like the Las Vegas case where the man shot himself in the head while detonating an improvised explosive in his Cybertruck.
This doesn't even get into sample size - the Tesla numbers are based on only 3 incidents and 5 fatalities:
- one, a single-car accident in which 3 people died,
- two, a single-car accident in which 1 person died, and
- three, the driver shot himself in the head
If, say, the first driver hadn't had any passengers and the third driver had not been included in the sample (because it's not a collision), the Cybertruck's rate would be 60% lower. With such a small sample, it's very silly to make confident assertions about the relative risks here.
Finally, both articles are only talking about fire risks, not overall safety record. I would definitely bet that the Cybertruck has a significantly lower fatality rate per mile than a 1975 Pinto purely based on changes in vehicle safety testing and engineering since the 1970s.