Way off topic at this point, but it's late and I can't resist...

"Roger Halstead" wrote in message
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OTOH I've never been able to understand how society can ignore nearly
50,000 deaths a year on the highway.

The same way society ignores the enormous financial cost from automobile
accidents (fatal and non-fatal). We could spend a much smaller amount of
money on better driving training and enforcement, but Americans would rather
just go around sending their cars to body shops or buying new ones, spending
money on medical insurance, and waiting for their turn at the courtroom
lottery.

The same thing is true for many other areas of American life. People would
rather waste great huge gobs of money than to start paying better attention
and start taking responsibility for their own actions.

The Wars on Drugs and Terrorism are similarly examples of wastes of money;
they remind me of dilatant fluids, in that the more force one applies, the
less one gets done. We'd be much better off with less expensive, more
subtle approaches.

Even when the economy is going well, but especially when it's in the
doldrums, I am disgusted by the amount of economic waste this country
tolerates and even encourages.

Of course, some might argue that the economy actually *benefits* from all
this waste, by creating "churn". I'm no economist, so I won't try to argue
for or against that point. I do think it's trivially obvious that it's
better in the long run to conserve money.

Anyway, whatever point I had, I'm sure it's in there somewhere. I agree
it's ridiculous how we ignore the deaths on the highway, but there's a
fundamental problem with the average person's thinking (if you can call it
that) that will always prevent us from fixing that, along with a number of
other problems.

One of the costs of having a truly equal society is that even the dumb
people get to vote. And there are a lot more dumb people than smart people.


Pete