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There's something you can do for all of those things. You can avoid beestings by always wearing a beekeeper's outfit. You can avoid lightning strikes by always
by x1798DE 12y ago
There's something you can do for all of those things. You can avoid beestings by always wearing a beekeeper's outfit. You can avoid lightning strikes by always keeping yourself grounded. You can avoid dying in a bathtub by never taking a bath. These are actually way easier deaths to prevent than stopping terrorism, where you have an active adversary who, without your intervention, will work to attack you. There's always a cost-benefit tradeoff with every risk you take.
Terrorism is an insanely small risk - in 2012 33,000 people died in motor vehicle accidents, which is about 2750 people each month. Compare to 9/11, which was the worst terrorist attack in history, where 3000 people died. Basically, there is accidental death on the scale of 9/11 happening every single month on US roads. And I'm not even saying we need to do something about that - everyone's pretty comfortable with the level of risk they take when driving. It's just not a big flashy risk like the kind that shows up on the news.
Terrorism probably feels riskier because it happens in big clumps. If you were anywhere except a very specific building in New York or a very specific building in Washington, DC on 9/11, you were at pretty much zero risk of dying of terrorism, but a huge fraction of the people in those two places were at extremely high risk for death by terrorism. By that logic, we should be spending a whole lot more on near-earth asteroid defenses and research into how to stop the Yellowstone caldera from exploding, because even though neither of those things is particularly likely to be the thing that kills any of us, if they do go off they'll kill a remarkably large number of people.