> Here’s an honest question – would you be OK if the government reduced the posted speed limits by 50%, required all motorists to wear helmets, and outlawed all

> Here’s an honest question – would you be OK if the government reduced the posted speed limits by 50%, required all motorists to wear helmets, and outlawed all left turns? If not, why not? Doing so would save almost 40,000 lives a year. Rhetorical devices like this one are always telling. Rowe expects -- assumes, really -- that the answer is "no". It's a foregone conclusion. My answer, even as a person who made a living driving at one point in my life, where timelier trips meant more money for me, is "yeah, that'd be fine". (Do I want to be forced to live in a world where I'm made to wear a helmet, have my speed capped, etc, while the rest of the world goes on as it does now? No, I don't, but that's both contrived and fails to deliver the value of safety baked into the premise, although I suspect that there's a non-zero chance that upon hearing my answer ("yes"), Rowe or at least some of the folks he entertains would resort to a dishonest retort in this vein.) There's an ignored factor here, too. I've done plenty of work in the scope of Dirty Jobs. Another implicit assumption from the perspective of Rowe and the producers is that the pool of people willing to do a lot of these jobs is so small -- that things are the way they are because stuff has to get done, but so few are willing to do it (in comparison to the people who are okay sitting behind a desk in an admin role, for example). In fact, the induced lack of safety is one of the reasons why the pool is as small as it is. Just look at policing for example, putting aside the matter of safety for a moment to focus on something broader. How many people are willing to be cops? How many people would be willing to be cops if it matched the picture of the noble job we put into kids' heads, instead of working in the police departments that exist in the US? My guess? Easily >2x. One of the main reasons not to be a cop comes from the set of people who'd be your colleagues, and the policies that your superiors carry out. (Who wants to be an enabler for a system that allows mediocrity to rise to positions of power and then claim that its' workforce's actions are almost always justified, even when they clearly miss the mark of justice?) Lots of the dirty jobs are like this, too. The things that make them "dirty" (unattractive) are often the result of the people not the the job, and are usually entirely avoidable. (Just about the only situation I've seen where the working compromises to "safety" don't raise my hackles was building cabinets. Every nail gun in the shop was rigged to disable the safety, for speed reasons. This was avoidable to a degree that seems silly when compared to the compromises of other jobs. Even so, this is the one that was justified and reasonable, but I'll omit the explanation for why, because that's a topic in and of itself, and this comment is long enough already.)