0 Traffic 1,350,000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... (2016)
Consider the move from horse drawn carriages to vehicles.
It was an acceptable risk that anyone might be permanently disabled due to being kicked in the head or trampled by a horse.
This might be a horse you are simply walking past. Or one that is spooked and running down the street. The owner of the horse beared little to no responsibility.
Now it is largely acceptable, to permanently disable or kill someone due to a mistake or some form of common negligence while operating a vehicle.
It is almost not a crime to accidentally run someone over. This is “normal” or “not intentional.”
In the future, it will seem insane to have allowed so many people manual control over multi-ton vehicles.
Just as it does not make sense that a horse would be tied up outside Trader Joe’s and due to a spook permanently disable you as you exit the store.
It will seem so primitive to have such loose controls on cars that if you chose to drive a manually controlled car killing someone will likely be seen as dangerous enough of a choice that a person would be held liable for manslaughter.
> Now it is largely acceptable, to permanently disable or kill someone due to a mistake or some form of common negligence while operating a vehicle.
There were many years at the beginning of the automobile where laws were created[1] to save humans, horses, and livestock from being run into by automobiles or locomotives. After enough of society was normalized to the existence of large guided missiles, these ways were dismantled.
> It is almost not a crime to accidentally run someone over. This is “normal” or “not intentional.”
It's not 1st degree murder (usually), but the circumstances of a traffic collision do sometimes bring felony convictions. Society has absorbed the risk and people have adapted.
Interesting note: US and Euro cars can't be homogenized because the US NHTSA tends to assume that passengers don't wear seatbelts (so manufacturers optimize for fewer injuries with that assumption) whereas the Euro equivalent assumes that all passengers do wear seat belts and optimize for that assumption.
> In the future, it will seem insane to have allowed so many people manual control over multi-ton vehicles.
I think future people will be capable of some amount of empathy with people who came before them who had to deal with inferior technology.
I don't know if horses were statistically more or less dangerous than cars, but I feel like when I read about a random historical figure from before cars it's pretty common they died from a riding accident.
Today, horses are allowed on public streets and not regarded as particularly deadly, at least in my locale. In particular, the police ride them during public events.
I have, on occasion, ridden a horse, a bicycle, a motorcycle, driven a car, and ridden in planes. The only time I was seriously injured was on a bicycle.
Horses give excellent visibility, they can stand and walk slowly, the take less space than a car, they are fast if needed and people tend to move away from a moving horse quite naturally
While I think that we should totally put the blame on drunk drivers, I would still make a distinction between negligence and intentionality.
Saying that drunk drivers intentionally kill people opens the door to saying that bad doctors kill people, bad medicine teachers kill people, people who vote for the wrong politicians kill people, politicians who enact bad laws kill people, etc.
At that point the discussion devolves into "your party kills people because your ideology is wrong", "no, yours is"
We distinguish this from "malice", which is when you do something with the direct intent to cause harm. An engineer who verifies that a design causes harm, and signs off on it because they want to cause harm, is being malicious.
Malfeasance is a crime, but it's one we actually can't catch very well, which is the reason we can't "do statistics" on it. Unlike with murder (where we almost always know that somebody caused someone's death, even if we don't know who; and therefore we can work out the statistics even without resolving the perpetrators); we have no idea (without thorough, expensive investigations that don't usually happen) how many of the e.g. buildings that fell over, fell over because of malfeasance, rather than because of a complex accident.
There's a lot of data[0][1][2][3] to back up the correlation between speed and deaths, that's the whole focus of vision zero[4].
[0]: https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...
[1]: https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/speeding
[2]: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/motor-vehicle-safe...
[3]: https://www.curbed.com/2017/7/28/16051780/us-traffic-death-s...
Is it appropriate to apply a universal standard, or the standard of the person who was involved in the event?
It depends on what you want to calculate. I think in a way, the latter is more objective than using an arbitrary single standard.
https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/states/occupant_death...
I don't know that California (4.2 deaths per 100,000) would be somehow more productive if people died form cars at the rate of Missouri (10.2).
Here is a more complete summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22945974 NYC had 30% increase of unexplained deaths recent months, whereas Sweden had -4%.
You seem to be confirming that you are one of those people for whom a conversation that mentions the US can have no fixed point other than how inferior it is to Europe or the Nordic countries. Which is what I'm annoyed by. It's the lack of genuine dialog that is the issue.
1.5 Suicides 800 000
I was in an a little bit conflict zone recently, and people asked if I was worried and said I should be careful. They didn't know -- the local people living there -- that the traffic is 100 times more dangerous than the slightly ongoing conflict. They just look at the news and feel worried about whatever the newspapers write about, which is _not_ the traffic.
And maybe people would realize they're being manipulated by media and the "presidents" who own the media -- those presidents tend to get more votes, the more afraid people are for each other.
> collective psychological effect
Maybe peace?
And fewer traffic accidents, more subways and trains. Better mental care
> Approximately 475,000 people die every year at the hand of fellow man. In a world filled with conflict, war, murders, and acts of terrorism, this is unfortunately not that surprising. Deaths among humans are intentional and pre-calculated making them beyond tragic.
Traffic is not an attack.
Cows or the sugar plant depending on who you believe if we are counting anything. We attack them and we die.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_dog_attacks_in_t...
The pattern appears to be, very young child, or older adult, attacked by either a pitbull or pack of dogs.
That's not an accident.
The only way to dissuade the pit, after what was at least a couple of minutes of this and with the smaller dog being disemboweled, was that I stabbed the pit bull in the neck with my pocket knife.
Their physical power and stubbornness should not be taken for granted.
Both dogs survived the incident.
The smaller ~20lbs dog was being courageously held onto by its owner underneath both dogs for the entire ~fight~ mauling to prevent it from being taken away and killed by the ~100lbs pit bull. I didn't see in that situation that I had time to consult with a respected behaviorist and get into the dog's upbringing, give it some positive reinforcement, tummy rubs, and treats, but I did finally get its attention.
Stabbing the pit bull ended the attack within seconds. My intent was to kill it at that point, but I was unsuccessful. That is my only regret in the situation.
Another bystander took the small dog and its owner to the pet hospital in her car where emergency surgery saved its life.
I'm not sure the eventual fate of the pit bull but I know that it was turned over to the custody of the local SPCA and the owner was given some type of citation.
No, it's about how to de-escalate a severe situation without loss of life. (Good) policemen don't break up a fight between an 18 yr old and 10 yr old by viciously beating and then stabbing the 18 yr old. My point was only that the instincts of those involved made the situation worse before it was made better. And based on the new facts, starting with the owner.
Just as with humans, there's a well understood hierarchy of severity of tools for handling situations such as that one, though only a small minority of dog owners know them. It's incredibly unfortunate that dog lives are more or less toys for humans to play with, otherwise this fight is likely to never have happened if it was a severe as you say before it turned into a five animal brawl.
Bottom line the three of you DID make it worse before it was made better. The punching and kicking won't help in all probability. It's simply not on the spectrum of effective tools. Killing is on the far end, so I'm not begrudging your actions, I'm begrudging the behavior before it: yelling (probably), kicking, and punching instead of forcing the bite, wheelbarrowing, and other environmental tools that may have been available. Y'know, the things that animal behaviorists have figured out, how to cause specific behaviors, like stopping a dog from biting another during a fight.
I'm not sure why I wrote this comment since apparently your only regret is not achieving your intent which was to kill the dog. You managed to stop the fight without causing death, a huge win, but you wish otherwise. I sincerely hope your future is brighter than your past.
Nope, this was more like a 10 year old being savagely beaten by a 30 year old very strong, very violent, out of his mind MMA fighter who wanted to kill the 10 year old.
What you're saying makes sense for some breeds. The whole point was that pitbulls are more agressive and violent than other breeds.
My biggest issue from the start was the socialization of "three bystanders took part simultaneously in kicking and punching the pit bull to get it to release," which failed, predictably, and I didn't want anyone to think that that was a good thing to try in the first place.
I don't know what would have been, so to speak, appropriate and would have been effective. The one thing I knew to try was to do the wheelbarrow and that did nothing at leas in attitude of the pit bull. I was totally focused on my not being excessively injured or letting the other dog be torn apart and didn't organize anyone else's interaction, like "I'll hold the legs and you kick it."
If anything it was the opposite of bystander syndrome where everyone thinks someone else will do whatever is needed. Everyone there was doing whatever they could with the tools and knowledge or lack of knowledge that they had.
You cannot ever know what his intentions were, and to accuse him of that is pretty disgusting.
> "My intent was to kill it at that point, but I was unsuccessful. That is my only regret in the situation."
Why do you think such a terrible leap of logic would work here?
I hope your logic is not: "I can imagine how A might cause X, therefore I believe B cannot possibly cause X." Easy way for people too fool themselves into believing unsupported ideas.
Pit bulls are stronger and more capable of injuring or killing a human than most other breeds.
Both can be true. But if you want the "bad owner" theory to explain why 80% of all fatalities are pit-related , you are essentially calling at 80% percent (or higher) of owners dangerously negligent.
Bad pit owners exist. Pits have a dangerous combination of mentality and strength. You can use a gun as a can opener if you want to, that doesn't change the ability it has to remove a life.
1. 80% of fatal dog attacks are by pit bulls.
This is complete nonsense from dogsbite.org actually nobody tracks this. This "statistic" is at best comprised by trying to compile news articles that notoriously misidentify any large breed mutt responsible for attacks as pit bulls.
2. If 80% of fatal are attacks are caused by pit bulls and negligent owners were the cause of attacks then 80% of owners must be negligent.
3. 80% of owners being negligent is an absurd conclusion thus the conclusion that bites are largely caused by negligent owners must be false.
Premise 2 is the result of what I like to call number gluing. To explicate people have 2 entities which they can attach a numerical identity to that seem related so people just mentally stick them together instead of doing the mathematical reasoning to figure out how the 2 relate. It's not that they don't "exactly" relate how you said they do they don't relate AT ALL. With no other numbers its entirely impossible to reason about which portion of owners are negligent or even how their average negligence relates to owners of say rottweilers and dobermans. There are 3.6 million pit bulls in the US and 40 people are killed annually. Even if every fatality was caused by a pit bull we could conclude from that fact that 1 in a million pit bull owners are negligent. The prior poster wasn't distracting from your argument he demolished it like a bulldozer.
2. Shifting all the blame onto owners is ignoring the clear trend. If 100% of gun owners were safe and responsible, there would still be gun deaths because of the capacity of a gun to kill someone. Same with Pits.
3. I agree but that's your logic, not mine.
You are also shifting focus from Pits attacking other dogs (the point of this thread) to attacking people. Fine, they account for most dog attacks on other dogs and on people. You seem to have your own justifications for why that is, and why it's ok, but those only work on you. Because you want to believe your Pitbull is an angel from heaven and not a well trained, but inherently dangerous animal.
https://www.dogsbite.org/dog-bite-statistics-fatalities-2020...
Entry after entry is pitbull.
"Pictured are the two most deadly dog breeds in America: pit bull terriers and rottweilers. Research from DogsBite.org shows that during the 14-year period from 2005 to 2018, canines killed 471 Americans. Pit bulls and rottweilers accounted for 76% (358) of these deaths."
https://www.snopes.com/news/2016/10/25/bsl-and-dog-bites/
> Restricting breed ownership has not reduced the incidence of dog bites. A survey of reported dog bite rates in 36 Canadian municipalities found no difference between jurisdictions with BSL and those without. Likewise, a 2010 Toronto Humane Society survey found no change in dog bites in Ontario in the years before and after Ontario’s BSL.
> Calgary, however, saw a five-fold reduction over 20 years – from 10 bites per 10,000 people in 1986 to two in 2006. Rather than banning breeds, Calgary uses strong licensing and enforcement plus dog safety public education campaigns.
It would be great if you stopped promoting strategies that don't work and started promoting ones that do.
Looking at the link it relies on news paper stories to report that the death happened and then uses the reporters words to correctly identify the breed even though this may actually result in pit bulls being over counted and some fatalities being missed. In fact if you peruse the source its sufficient for an attack to be pit bull related for any given source to refer to the dogs as pit bulls. So if a dozen sources report on the matter and one misidentifies the culprit as a pit bull pit bull kill it is. As an example I found in the first dozen cases a "pit bull kill" wherein nobody saw the person get killed but a neighbor testified that there were problematic dogs in the neighborhood which the neighbor says are pit bulls. I found another which was a literal homicide in which the murderers dog attacked the victim while he was murdering them. It's hard to justify digging through 400 some cases when 1/6th of the first 12 are obviously complete nonsense and the rest are of unknown quality without extensive research not composed of finding newspaper articles and grepping for the word pit in any article about a particular incident.
The citations show the article title but not a url to the actual source making identifying just how bad the source in unnecessarily cumbersome but anyone that spends more than 5 minutes studying it ought to come to the conclusion that dogsbite.org is shockingly not even trying to do an unbiased analysis. It's a hit piece serving the interests of a lobbying group of dog haters who in many cases want to steal people's family pets and kill them to address a problem that kills about the same number of people annually as drowning in bath tubs.
Usually only having one biased source of truth is an indication that you are hanging out with the flat earth society. I invite you to join the rest of us on the round earth.
Sure, doesn't detract from my point at all. Nitpicking numbers is not a good use of anyone's time.
Your entire argument seems to rely solely on attacking the source. Everything I google turns up similar numbers
https://www.caninejournal.com/dog-bite-statistics/ https://www.dogsbite.org/dog-bite-statistics-studies.php
If you are going to grab your tin foil hat and claim an internet-wide conspiracy against your dog of choice, fine. I don't see any reason to participate.
Many dogs involved in attacks are erroneously typed as pitbulls (which is, in fact, a designation encompassing at least 3 different distinct breeds); genetic testing later reveals that they were not. Pitbulls are the "Moors" of dog breeds.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109002331... https://dogbitesohio.com/are-pit-bulls-unfairly-being-design...
Unfortunately, the stigma surrounding pitbulls is influenced by shaky notions of racial and behavioral genetics that mirror eugenics and its progeny.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/08/racism-and-the-americ...
https://www.newindianexpress.com/lifestyle/health/2020/jan/1...
https://www.underwatertimes.com/news.php?article_id=03214697...
I actually saw this standup bit recently and after Googling, it looks like it was borrowed ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLwYkZUNvKo&feature=youtu.be...
To clarify, it's actually the other way around, the standup came BEFORE the blog. Should have realized the upload date is not the performance date.
https://www.espn.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/3722/shark-atta...
Sharks can't do very much damage to humans because, in the natural course of events, it is impossible for a shark and a human to meet.
But sharks are quite dangerous conditioned on the fact that you're encountering one.
In countries that have good rabies control this is not an issue. For example, the US has 30 - 50 deaths due to dogs each year.
In countries around the world, it's more about packs of wild dogs and rabies, instead of just rabies alone.
Countries/Regions that have wild dog pack problems: India, Some Eastern European countries, South East Asia (almost all people who grew up in South Eastern Asia would have a childhood story of being followed home by a pack of dogs. They are quiet at the beginning, they follow you, and if no one else is home when you get there, LOCK THE DOOR and God protect you), some parts of Australia.
Growing up, I was ashamed that my dad was so scared of dogs, but the dogs he grew up around were incredibly violent and unpredictable compared to the domestics we’re so accustomed to here in the States. I think he and his brothers raised a puppy they found in the village, and it bit him pretty terribly when it grew up, so he has zero trust for animals. And he’s the most rational man I know, so it was weird to see him carry this memory so strongly into his 50s and 60s.
I don’t think he’s ever used it before (he lives in the Bay Area), but he’ll literally turn back from 5 blocks away if he realizes he’s forgotten it. I guess I’m trying to say: these kinds of environments are really traumatizing, and you should totally believe what the parent is saying. It’s a different world out there.
> Any human interaction with a shark in its environment, shark wins.
this is straight-up wrong. Humans and sharks interact all. the. time. They're not killing machines.
I imagine you probably know that, so I'm not trying to patronize you (honestly). But this is really important.
SHARKS KILLED 4 HUMANS IN 2018. HUMANS KILLED 100 MILLION SHARKS IN 2018.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/01/28/shark-a...
Most people spend maybe hours a year in shark ecosystem. Vs 365 days a year in dog country, or mosquito etc.
Swimming with reef sharks vs taking a hike in a malaria infested jungle? Swimming with reef sharks please.
Most sharks will run away from the human as the human and their bubbles look far bigger than they are. They are more intimidated by us than we are by them.
You run into mosquitoes 30k times a year, one of them may kill you, and most of the time you could have saved yourself on your own.
https://www.insectidentification.org/insect-description.asp?...
Wonder if those Murder Hornets will make next year's list?
I was curious, so:
> Since 2001, the yearly human death toll caused by stings of bees, wasps and hornets in Japan has been ranging between 12 and 26.[26] Since this number also includes deaths caused by wasps, bees, and other hornet species, the number of deaths caused by Asian giant hornets is likely to be significantly lower.[citation needed]
from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_giant_hornet
[26] is a Japanese source that I cannot read.
Seems like they're not a huge threat?
Their nests are pretty cool though. Kinda like a flat hex grid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduviidae#/media/File:Assassi...
If they disproportionally kill even more than other mosquitoes, that also puts things into greater perspective. Perhaps if we could target this particular species, it would save millions of human lives.
"""Mosquitoes kill more people than every other animal combined. One species, Aedes aegypti, carries diseases such as dengue, Zika, yellow fever, and chikungunya which make hundreds of millions of people sick every year"""
[1]: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Mosquito-Week-2018
[2]: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/gates-foundation-teams-oxitec-...
This is a horrible way to spend the last few seconds of your life on Earth and it likely triggers all the self-preservation instincts in a human mind, and then some.
The slow, painful death from a debilitating disease like malaria does not even come close for sheer compulsive terror. After all, most people experience sickness at some point during their lives, but very few experience being eaten.
This "raw, visceral horror of being eaten alive by a very big fish" [1] is the reason why people are afraid of shark attacks much more than mosquito bites or even accidents etc.
____________
[1] That's a quote from a National Geographic article I read a few years ago that stuck in my mind. I have no reference to it, apologies. It was in an issue of the print magazine.
https://www.askmen.com/news/entertainment/deers-kill-more-pe...
1 Hepatitis 1,340,000
2 Mosquito 1,000,000
3 HIV 770,000
4 Influenza 489,000
5 Human 475,000
6 Rotavirus 440,000
7 Hantavirus 150,000
8 Measles 140,000
9 Rabies 69,000
10 Snake 50,000
1 Mosquito 1,000,000
2 Human 475,000
3 Snake 50,000
4 Dog 25,000
5 Tsetse Fly 10,000 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdocI'd like to know if the OP manually aligned the columns in the table, if they used a program to do so, or something els.
We get malaria from a parasite that is spread by mosquitoes.
We get tuberculosis from a bacteria that is spread by humans.
TB kills more than three times as many people every year as malaria. Why is malaria counted as a death caused by mosquitoes but TB isn't a death caused by humans? Either you count both or you count neither.
It is probably fair to count TB deaths in the "human kills" category, but I think we usually make a differentiation between human to human disease and disease caused by contact with an animal. It's just the way we see ourselves as separate from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Although I get what you're saying, I don't think that human deaths caused by TB is necessarily what people are interested in when you aggregate all of the of humans at the hand of other humans, which may be why those deaths are omitted.
They're saying that 1,000,000 is the number for mosquitos, not because they kill people but their a carrier of disease.
What they are asking is do we consider other animals in the same capacity, such as, does the number beside humans include human transmittable diseases (HIV for example).
Seems like a reasonable question.
Just to be clear, I think it's a perfectly reasonable question. A rational question can still contain a potential flaw.
But I did misunderstand what they were asking.
Humans are also vectors for pathogens, we just don't count them as such.
They don't count humans the same as other animals, instead, they count homicide/war (intentional killing), and you can just consider it a point of reference. Are you going to count accidents? Suicide? Anything that can be traced to human decisions? Anything that can be traced to human biology?
Any way you count humans, it just isn't going to be equivalent.
First - if you're going to say 'mosquitos kill humans because they transmit disease' and then include humans for a completely different reason (i.e. homicide) makes for an odd comparison.
For example, what if human transmission of the communicable disease results in some massive amount of death, which could very well be the case?
Second - mosquitoes are carrying a lot of otherwise benign things, which most people recover fine from. Possibly things like the flu. Well some people die from the flu, but very rarely. So I'm not sure if the fact it was communicated by a mosquito or something else makes sense.
Maybe inanimate objects, like the door handle to your public building, contribute more to basic pathogen spread, like the flu, in which case again, that would put things in context.
It's a tricky thing to compare lions attacking people to mosquitos that happen to spread in some cases, some minor thing that in may have rare deadly consequences.
Malaria is almost exclusively spread by mosquitos, so there is a certain logic to saying "mosquitos kill a lot of people." But you are right that most times you are bitten by a mosquito, it is nothing but a minor annoyance. It's a bit different from a lion.
Some people include deer in such charts, because people die by crashing their cars into deer. But that is pretty different too.