12 ms·

"those top 10 causes of death are abetted by risks some of us long ago rationally (or semi-rationally) decided to accept: smoking, drinking, overeating, driving

by wffurr 5y ago

"those top 10 causes of death are abetted by risks some of us long ago rationally (or semi-rationally) decided to accept: smoking, drinking, overeating, driving, kissing, chainsaw-juggling and so on." I wish we could, as a society, rationally work on reducing some of those risks. Smoking is on its way out, finally, with substantial public education, taxes, peer pressure, etc. But smoking mostly only affects oneself, second-hand smoke notwithstanding. Some risks, like choosing to drive all the time including while angry, sleep-deprived, distracted, etc., or choosing not to be vaccinated, aren't just on yourself, they're increasing the risk for everyone around you. I can't safely go the store even if I choose to walk or bike because some jackass might decide to pick up a french fry instead of look where they're going and jump the sidewalk or veer into the bike lane and turn me into paste. There's not really anything I can do about it, except huddle in fear in my house. It's infuriating. Similarly while I'm vaccinated and thus my risk of hospitalization or death from COVID 19 is effectively 0, my three year old son is not. People choosing not to vaccinate are putting him at risk, which really twists me up inside.

floxy 5y ago
>Similarly while I'm vaccinated and thus my risk of hospitalization or death from COVID 19 is effectively 0, my three year old son is not. When will you get your son vaccinated?
- wffurr 5y ago
  As soon as vaccines are available for his age group.
bubbleRefuge 5y ago
This post is akin to someone pinching me and saying "hey, we live in polarized country!" The so called culture wars just seem to be escalating.
- wffurr 5y ago
  What part of this is in any way related to "culture war"?
  - rayiner 5y ago
    Attitudes toward balancing risk versus convenience are cultural. Historically, the United States was pretty accepting of risky and risk creating activities. These days much less so. Attitudes toward driving are deeply cultural and affect many aspects of life. I just got back from Dallas. It’s extremely car-oriented, with a vast network of express lanes connecting far-flung suburbs. It also has low housing costs and tons of kids and kid-related activities. These are all related: wrangling one kid on a subway train is doable, much less so three. When you say “driving is bad” you’re touching on myriad aspects of how people have chosen to structure their live, including their reproductive choices.
    - screye 5y ago
      I know you meant the car centric anecdote to be an analogy and not the point itself, but I must nitpick. Public transportation/buses/subways are honestly quite convenient even if you are wrangling 3 kids around. The problem is that public transportation in the US at its best (NYC, Boston) is still a far-cry from actually 'good' public transportation systems. In many places kids as young as 11 are able to independently navigate the city without the parents help when public transportation is well built. If anything, car dependence means that kids take 5 more years (16) before they can be independant and parents will often struggle to meet diverging needs of 3 children when the car is a single bottleneck. Not-just-bikes does a great contrast between North America and the Netherlands to highlight how car-dependence can lead to struggles as a parent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98 Also, given that most upper middle class families usually have 3 cars (2 for parents work and 1 for a 16-yr old child), if public transport allows you to go from 3 -> 1, that's already a huge plus. It is not like families in European capitals do not own 5 seater hatchbacks. Public transport isn't against cars. It's is against car essentialism. If anything, moving people to public transport will improve the experience of those who need cars by declogging highways. Lastly, car essentialism, highways, the suburban dream and white flight were all distinctly post-WW2 phenomena and heavily subsidized to be that way. It is by no means a part of American culture. Most pre-ww2 cities such as the ones in the NE had perfectly acceptable public transportation for the time, which has since not been maintained as well. Even smaller cities such as Portsmouth NH and Portland ME are incredibly walkable, dense and public transport friendly. (rural culture is an entirely different point. If you own 10,000 acres of corn fields ofc you own a tractor or a pickup. No one is suggesting public transportation for them) Older American suburbs are actually far less cardependent than you'd think: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVeSiWTU74s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVeSiWTU74s) Dallas style urban design has existed for less than 70 years, and was specifically engineered by politicians and corporate interests rather than being a natural outcome of American cultural desires.
amanaplanacanal 5y ago
Street design can help a lot with pedestrian (and bicycle) safety. Unfortunately most of our efforts most have been put towards the safety of the people inside the car instead.
Grim-444 5y ago
"People choosing not to vaccinate are putting him at risk". This might not exactly be the strongest point to make, as the Covid IFR rate for those under 17 is 20 in 1,000,000, or a 99.998% survival rate. Sure, there's a non-zero chance of death but it's effectively zero. It's great to say we should reduce risks further as a society, but is it really worth the costs to reduce risks like that further? Source: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
- aqme28 5y ago
  Consider then my family member, who is elderly and immuno-compromised such that the vaccine may not be effective.
  - newaccount2021 5y ago
    The goalposts will never stop moving, will they? Alright, I'll bite - here is the solution to your problem: move your elderly, immuno-compromised ward into a hermetically sealed facility and do not permit visitors of any kind. Problem solved. If they're truly immuno-compromised, they're just as susceptible to thousands of other communicable viral loads, so they're not much better off even if society becomes 100% vaccinated against covid. What's left, pets?
  - nradov 5y ago
    Immunocompromised people always have been at risk and always will be at risk. The presence of one more endemic coronavirus doesn't really change anything. Other endemic coronaviruses already have a high fatality rate in that population. I don't mean to minimize your family member's situation but that's just medical reality. https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/223/9/1564/5899001 https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/223/9/1564/5899001
    - hvac 5y ago
      Having an already-high baseline risk before adding covid is a reason to be more cautious, not less. The point is that this particular vector is so trivially preventable.
liquidise 5y ago
Have the statistics changed for people under 10 with covid? Early on data suggested almost no hospitalizations or deaths for young people.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  If you assume that lung damage is to an extent irreversible and accumulates over time (peobbat less true for pre-puberty children than adults), then you'd expect lung damage to be less immediately fatal in the young yet still have similar effect, just delayed.
  - nradov 5y ago
    That is not a valid assumption. There is no evidence that lung damage is common in children, or that it is irreversible.
- sharken 5y ago
  According to this link 287 out of 568.000 has died from Covid, though that is in the age group 0-17 years. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-from-covid-by-age-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bobthepanda 5y ago
In a good chunk of the US driving is unavoidable due to long distances and poor options. There was a story a few years ago about a Detroit man who walked 21 miles to work https://amp.freep.com/amp/22660785 https://amp.freep.com/amp/22660785 I like building out transit but to be quite realistic we are never going to get to China levels of building out fast enough transit covering a majority of jobs and we can’t undo the great big sprawl of places like Houston or Dallas or Atlanta.
hervature 5y ago
> Similarly while I'm vaccinated and thus my risk of hospitalization or death from COVID 19 is effectively 0, my three year old son is not. People choosing not to vaccinate are putting him at risk, which really twists me up inside. It appears that you understand that the vaccine doesn't make you immune to COVID but rather reduces the symptoms. Given this, you can still catch it and pass it to your child. You are probably still their most likely vector. Have you changed your habits (being more social) since receiving the vaccine? If so, is your argument that those you are now socializing with are responsible for spreading it to your son through you?
- ls612 5y ago
  This is outdated. The CDC guidelines about masks explicitly stated that studies in the real world confirm that you are exceedingly unlikely to get or spread covid after vaccination with the mRNA shots. That’s why they said it is not needed for vaccinated people to wear masks.
  - hervature 5y ago
    This is not outdated, The CDC website still says this is an active area of research. “Early data” indicates otherwise but we already know vaccines are not 100% effective. I don’t know why you’re believing the CDC on this after they pulled the same stunt on masks early on to achieve a political mission (reserve PPE for medical people) and even admit this is to incentivize those who are opposed to getting vaccinated by dangling the “no mask required” carrot in front of them. The default stance of the CDC should be cautious towards early data and not use it as a means to alter people’s behavior.
- wffurr 5y ago
  Wow, you're next level. Have you thought about how that comment reads to a worried parent?
tenpoundhammer 5y ago
I think your perspective shows one side of a continuum between Personal Freedom <----> Collective Safety. It would seem that at some point maybe in the 50's or maybe the 80's a majority of people decided the debate around this was solved and the US would favor personal freedom over everything else. It's clear that as a society we have decided to re-open this debate. While the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle the most important part of this issue is the nuance. It's become very common to lash out and villainize people on the other end of the spectrum or just people in a slightly different place on the spectrum. I think we first need to carefully consider the variables and hedge our statements. For example, a friend of mine in her 50s was recently verbally accosted, by an employee of the store she was at, for not being vaccinated because she was wearing a mask after it wasn't required . But she is in fact vaccinated and wants to continue to wear a mask because she has many health problems. Just assuming the other side is needlessly putting other people at risk because they are selfish is overly simple and will fail to address the root issues at play. The same is true for the other side of the argument, assuming people hate freedom and want to make all your decisions for you because their evil or think your stupid is also failing to address the real issues. With some nuance and understanding injected into these conversations we might be less polarized and have options that work for more people.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  At the bottom of it all, different people have different values and there's no way around that. And some people are hateful and aggressive due to their personal mental state.
- rubyist5eva 5y ago
  > But she is in fact vaccinated and wants to continue to wear a mask because she has many health problems. Does she know that a mask, by itself, offers effectively no protection from being infected by covid-19?
  - confidantlake 5y ago
    That is not true.
seanicus 5y ago
One of the biggest upsides of self-driving car tech developing further is that it will make life safer for pedestrians and cyclists. (But it definitely isn't there yet).
- sharken 5y ago
  Self-driving cars will not work well until we realize and accept that there will be casualties caused by these autonomous vehicles. I think it could work on the freeway and similar controlled environments, but it won't work in cities unless we start to modify the city environment, e.g. no bicycling allowed and so on.
sharken 5y ago
Not quite familiar with the term twist me up, but i take it that you take offense with people freely choosing not to be vaccinated. To me that kind of thinking while understandable has to go away. You have exactly the same situation with the flu, yet here we don't judge. So when the vaccines start doing their thing, i sincerely hope that this judgemental attitude will go away. In the same vein we should also treat vaccinated and non-vaccinated equal, otherwise it will be very hard to live with the virus.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  I think Covid will lead to a reevaluation of flu, and people have been disregarding the flu deaths and illness occurrenc rate as inevitable for too long.
- wffurr 5y ago
  I judge the shit out of people who don't get the flu shot, too. Get your goddamn vaccinations and protect yourself and everyone around you. It's real simple.
  - blandvegetables 5y ago
    you come across as a very horrible and hate filled person in your comments.
- confidantlake 5y ago
  We do judge for measles, mumps, and rubella. In the us, we don't allow the unvaccinated to attend schools.
  - sharken 5y ago
    Good point, to be specific i was only talking about the flu and Covid.
  - Dma54rhs 5y ago
    More freedoms in Europe when it comes to that matter.
ArkanExplorer 5y ago
Your three year old son is at 20x greater risk of dying from Influenza than COVID: https://freopp.org/the-chances-of-dying-from-covid-19-90cd5b885b52 https://freopp.org/the-chances-of-dying-from-covid-19-90cd5b...
- wffurr 5y ago
  Hence why he has gotten and will get a flu shot every year.

by wffurr 5y ago

floxy 5y ago

>Similarly while I'm vaccinated and thus my risk of hospitalization or death from COVID 19 is effectively 0, my three year old son is not. When will you get your son vaccinated?

wffurr 5y ago
As soon as vaccines are available for his age group.

bubbleRefuge 5y ago

This post is akin to someone pinching me and saying "hey, we live in polarized country!" The so called culture wars just seem to be escalating.

wffurr 5y ago
What part of this is in any way related to "culture war"?
- rayiner 5y ago
  Attitudes toward balancing risk versus convenience are cultural. Historically, the United States was pretty accepting of risky and risk creating activities. These days much less so. Attitudes toward driving are deeply cultural and affect many aspects of life. I just got back from Dallas. It’s extremely car-oriented, with a vast network of express lanes connecting far-flung suburbs. It also has low housing costs and tons of kids and kid-related activities. These are all related: wrangling one kid on a subway train is doable, much less so three. When you say “driving is bad” you’re touching on myriad aspects of how people have chosen to structure their live, including their reproductive choices.
  - screye 5y ago
    I know you meant the car centric anecdote to be an analogy and not the point itself, but I must nitpick. Public transportation/buses/subways are honestly quite convenient even if you are wrangling 3 kids around. The problem is that public transportation in the US at its best (NYC, Boston) is still a far-cry from actually 'good' public transportation systems. In many places kids as young as 11 are able to independently navigate the city without the parents help when public transportation is well built. If anything, car dependence means that kids take 5 more years (16) before they can be independant and parents will often struggle to meet diverging needs of 3 children when the car is a single bottleneck. Not-just-bikes does a great contrast between North America and the Netherlands to highlight how car-dependence can lead to struggles as a parent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98 Also, given that most upper middle class families usually have 3 cars (2 for parents work and 1 for a 16-yr old child), if public transport allows you to go from 3 -> 1, that's already a huge plus. It is not like families in European capitals do not own 5 seater hatchbacks. Public transport isn't against cars. It's is against car essentialism. If anything, moving people to public transport will improve the experience of those who need cars by declogging highways. Lastly, car essentialism, highways, the suburban dream and white flight were all distinctly post-WW2 phenomena and heavily subsidized to be that way. It is by no means a part of American culture. Most pre-ww2 cities such as the ones in the NE had perfectly acceptable public transportation for the time, which has since not been maintained as well. Even smaller cities such as Portsmouth NH and Portland ME are incredibly walkable, dense and public transport friendly. (rural culture is an entirely different point. If you own 10,000 acres of corn fields ofc you own a tractor or a pickup. No one is suggesting public transportation for them) Older American suburbs are actually far less cardependent than you'd think: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVeSiWTU74s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVeSiWTU74s) Dallas style urban design has existed for less than 70 years, and was specifically engineered by politicians and corporate interests rather than being a natural outcome of American cultural desires.

amanaplanacanal 5y ago

Street design can help a lot with pedestrian (and bicycle) safety. Unfortunately most of our efforts most have been put towards the safety of the people inside the car instead.

Grim-444 5y ago

"People choosing not to vaccinate are putting him at risk". This might not exactly be the strongest point to make, as the Covid IFR rate for those under 17 is 20 in 1,000,000, or a 99.998% survival rate. Sure, there's a non-zero chance of death but it's effectively zero. It's great to say we should reduce risks further as a society, but is it really worth the costs to reduce risks like that further? Source: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

aqme28 5y ago
Consider then my family member, who is elderly and immuno-compromised such that the vaccine may not be effective.
- newaccount2021 5y ago
  The goalposts will never stop moving, will they? Alright, I'll bite - here is the solution to your problem: move your elderly, immuno-compromised ward into a hermetically sealed facility and do not permit visitors of any kind. Problem solved. If they're truly immuno-compromised, they're just as susceptible to thousands of other communicable viral loads, so they're not much better off even if society becomes 100% vaccinated against covid. What's left, pets?
- nradov 5y ago
  Immunocompromised people always have been at risk and always will be at risk. The presence of one more endemic coronavirus doesn't really change anything. Other endemic coronaviruses already have a high fatality rate in that population. I don't mean to minimize your family member's situation but that's just medical reality. https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/223/9/1564/5899001 https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/223/9/1564/5899001
  - hvac 5y ago
    Having an already-high baseline risk before adding covid is a reason to be more cautious, not less. The point is that this particular vector is so trivially preventable.

liquidise 5y ago

Have the statistics changed for people under 10 with covid? Early on data suggested almost no hospitalizations or deaths for young people.

alisonkisk 5y ago
If you assume that lung damage is to an extent irreversible and accumulates over time (peobbat less true for pre-puberty children than adults), then you'd expect lung damage to be less immediately fatal in the young yet still have similar effect, just delayed.
- nradov 5y ago
  That is not a valid assumption. There is no evidence that lung damage is common in children, or that it is irreversible.
sharken 5y ago
According to this link 287 out of 568.000 has died from Covid, though that is in the age group 0-17 years. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-from-covid-by-age-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bobthepanda 5y ago

In a good chunk of the US driving is unavoidable due to long distances and poor options. There was a story a few years ago about a Detroit man who walked 21 miles to work https://amp.freep.com/amp/22660785 https://amp.freep.com/amp/22660785 I like building out transit but to be quite realistic we are never going to get to China levels of building out fast enough transit covering a majority of jobs and we can’t undo the great big sprawl of places like Houston or Dallas or Atlanta.

hervature 5y ago

> Similarly while I'm vaccinated and thus my risk of hospitalization or death from COVID 19 is effectively 0, my three year old son is not. People choosing not to vaccinate are putting him at risk, which really twists me up inside. It appears that you understand that the vaccine doesn't make you immune to COVID but rather reduces the symptoms. Given this, you can still catch it and pass it to your child. You are probably still their most likely vector. Have you changed your habits (being more social) since receiving the vaccine? If so, is your argument that those you are now socializing with are responsible for spreading it to your son through you?

ls612 5y ago
This is outdated. The CDC guidelines about masks explicitly stated that studies in the real world confirm that you are exceedingly unlikely to get or spread covid after vaccination with the mRNA shots. That’s why they said it is not needed for vaccinated people to wear masks.
- hervature 5y ago
  This is not outdated, The CDC website still says this is an active area of research. “Early data” indicates otherwise but we already know vaccines are not 100% effective. I don’t know why you’re believing the CDC on this after they pulled the same stunt on masks early on to achieve a political mission (reserve PPE for medical people) and even admit this is to incentivize those who are opposed to getting vaccinated by dangling the “no mask required” carrot in front of them. The default stance of the CDC should be cautious towards early data and not use it as a means to alter people’s behavior.
wffurr 5y ago
Wow, you're next level. Have you thought about how that comment reads to a worried parent?

tenpoundhammer 5y ago

I think your perspective shows one side of a continuum between Personal Freedom <----> Collective Safety. It would seem that at some point maybe in the 50's or maybe the 80's a majority of people decided the debate around this was solved and the US would favor personal freedom over everything else. It's clear that as a society we have decided to re-open this debate. While the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle the most important part of this issue is the nuance. It's become very common to lash out and villainize people on the other end of the spectrum or just people in a slightly different place on the spectrum. I think we first need to carefully consider the variables and hedge our statements. For example, a friend of mine in her 50s was recently verbally accosted, by an employee of the store she was at, for not being vaccinated because she was wearing a mask after it wasn't required . But she is in fact vaccinated and wants to continue to wear a mask because she has many health problems. Just assuming the other side is needlessly putting other people at risk because they are selfish is overly simple and will fail to address the root issues at play. The same is true for the other side of the argument, assuming people hate freedom and want to make all your decisions for you because their evil or think your stupid is also failing to address the real issues. With some nuance and understanding injected into these conversations we might be less polarized and have options that work for more people.

alisonkisk 5y ago
At the bottom of it all, different people have different values and there's no way around that. And some people are hateful and aggressive due to their personal mental state.
rubyist5eva 5y ago
> But she is in fact vaccinated and wants to continue to wear a mask because she has many health problems. Does she know that a mask, by itself, offers effectively no protection from being infected by covid-19?
- confidantlake 5y ago
  That is not true.

seanicus 5y ago

One of the biggest upsides of self-driving car tech developing further is that it will make life safer for pedestrians and cyclists. (But it definitely isn't there yet).

sharken 5y ago
Self-driving cars will not work well until we realize and accept that there will be casualties caused by these autonomous vehicles. I think it could work on the freeway and similar controlled environments, but it won't work in cities unless we start to modify the city environment, e.g. no bicycling allowed and so on.

sharken 5y ago

Not quite familiar with the term twist me up, but i take it that you take offense with people freely choosing not to be vaccinated. To me that kind of thinking while understandable has to go away. You have exactly the same situation with the flu, yet here we don't judge. So when the vaccines start doing their thing, i sincerely hope that this judgemental attitude will go away. In the same vein we should also treat vaccinated and non-vaccinated equal, otherwise it will be very hard to live with the virus.

alisonkisk 5y ago
I think Covid will lead to a reevaluation of flu, and people have been disregarding the flu deaths and illness occurrenc rate as inevitable for too long.
wffurr 5y ago
I judge the shit out of people who don't get the flu shot, too. Get your goddamn vaccinations and protect yourself and everyone around you. It's real simple.
- blandvegetables 5y ago
  you come across as a very horrible and hate filled person in your comments.
confidantlake 5y ago
We do judge for measles, mumps, and rubella. In the us, we don't allow the unvaccinated to attend schools.
- sharken 5y ago
  Good point, to be specific i was only talking about the flu and Covid.
- Dma54rhs 5y ago
  More freedoms in Europe when it comes to that matter.

ArkanExplorer 5y ago

Your three year old son is at 20x greater risk of dying from Influenza than COVID: https://freopp.org/the-chances-of-dying-from-covid-19-90cd5b885b52 https://freopp.org/the-chances-of-dying-from-covid-19-90cd5b...

wffurr 5y ago
Hence why he has gotten and will get a flu shot every year.